Leave No Trace

Coral Evans was walking along the beach in Brighton on Tuesday evening when she came across an unfamiliar sight. The Brighton resident returned the next day to find an even greater shock awaiting her: “There were onions everywhere, hundreds of thousands of onions.” Evans, who is the founding director of the Leave No Trace Brighton community group, said the beach was littered with countless miscellaneous items including single-use plastic coffee cup lids, unopened beer cans and vegetables such as sweet potatoes. The spectacle spurred her to post a call to arms on the group’s social media platforms, urging others to get involved with a litter pick on the beach. Brighton and Hove city council said its officers collected 1.9 tonnes of waste from beaches on Thursday, nearly four times the usual amount collected at this time of year. It added that it was working with the county’s five district and borough councils to arrange for the safe removal and disposal of the debris through contractors. On Sunday, it emerged that thousands of bags of chips had washed up near Eastbourne, with local resident Joel Bonnici saying that the beach looked “like the Caribbean golden sands” and that in some areas the chips were “two-and-a-half-feet deep”. Meanwhile, beaches across West Sussex have experienced similar problems over the past month, with the situation having been worsened by the impact of Storm Goretti. The first incident on 6 December last year involved 16 containers from the refrigerated cargo ship Baltic Klipper in the Solent, the stretch of water between the Isle of Wight and the British mainland. “The original spillage saw seven containers washing up across our 7½km [5 mile] beach … Whole containers washed up and literally broke up before your eyes,” Trethewey said. She added that containers breaking down at sea had led to their contents, including produce such as bananas and avocados alongside their plastic packaging, being washed up ashore. Trethewey said the group provided the litter it had collected to a contractor for West Sussex county council, who then took the items away for processing and eventual recycling. The local authority said on Wednesday it was aware of debris from a container washing ashore at Elmer in Bognor Regis, but that weather and water conditions had made recovery operations difficult, while waste materials from a container had been reported ashore between West Wittering and Shoreham-by-Sea. Dr Simon Boxall, an academic in oceanography at the University of Southampton, recalled an incident in 1992 when plastic Friendly Floatees bath toys washed into the Pacific Ocean from a container ship and ended up distributed across the world, demonstrating how the global ocean network is connected. “It is estimated that 2,200 containers fall off ships into the water each year. They are all being loaded on to ships so it’s not unheard of for a crane operator or system to slip and pop a container into the water,” he said. “Regarding the south coast, it’s not surprising we are seeing them as they have always been washing up. I can think of many cases over the years.” The lecturer highlighted threats to wildlife through the spilling of herbicides, pesticides and acids, with hazards to navigation also posed due to the containers floating just below the surface of the water. An Environment Agency spokesperson said it was closely monitoring the potential impact of washed-up containers in Sussex to wildlife and water. Members of the public have also been asked not to touch, move or take any washed-up waste or produce and to keep children and animals away. Despite the longstanding problem, a change in legislation could see the tide starting to turn. A clean-up operation on Selsey Beach in West Sussex. Photograph: Selsey Beach Litter Ninjas “It’s only a few containers to them but it displaces whole communities. Surfers and swimmers have been advised not to enter the water, and there’s no sign of the containers’