Cleaning up our coasts
Beach Guardian is an award-winning social enterprise based in Cornwall that aims to engage, educate and empower against plastic pollution. It was founded by alumna Emily Stevenson (MSc Conservation Science and Policy, 2020) and her dad in 2017.
Cleaning up our coasts
Beach Guardian is an award-winning social enterprise based in Cornwall that aims to engage, educate and empower against plastic pollution. It was founded by alumna Emily Stevenson (MSc Conservation Science and Policy, 2020) and her dad in 2017.
Cleaning up our coasts
Beach Guardian is an award-winning social enterprise based in Cornwall that aims to engage, educate and empower against plastic pollution. It was founded by alumna Emily Stevenson (MSc Conservation Science and Policy, 2020) and her dad in 2017.
Since then, they have organised more than 250 beach cleans, conducted more than 100 visits to schools and community groups, had more than 15,000 volunteer hours on beach cleans, and engaged with 50,000 school children and they’ve now worked with every primary and secondary school in Cornwall. Their social media posts have reached over 10 million people and they’ve worked with some of the world’s largest companies, to help them reduce their reliance on plastics, such as PepsiCo and Nissan.
Emily says: “Aged 11, I did a school art project using items found on the beach and I collected plastic. I don’t know whether in my head I viewed plastic as a natural item and just expected that plastic should be there, so that’s why I took it in. Or because instead of viewing it as waste I viewed it as a resource and knew that it shouldn’t just be discarded, and that we could repurpose it. After that I started a website to sell this plastic as an art resource, and then donated the money I raised to the Marine Conservation Society.”
Emily studied Marine Biology at university and through working on a final year project her understanding of the plastic pollution problem increased. She says: “Myself and my dad had this epiphany where we were like ‘we could be doing more, we should be doing more’, so we started Beach Guardian. Initially it was reactionary after a storm and plastics washed up and we’d clean it up, then more people got involved and it grew.”
The work that Beach Guardian does is divided into five areas: outreach (actual beach cleans, grassroots action of bringing people together and taking plastic out of the environment); education (they have a curriculum programme based on the key stages and go into schools to deliver workshops and provide the next generations with the knowledge); working with businesses; research; and collaboration.
The last two years of the global COVID-19 pandemic have increased the amount of PPE pollution such as face masks, that the team have been finding.
Emily says: “It’s been interesting to be able to monitor and document this because it’s totally unprecedented. Prior to the pandemic we’d never found a face mask but then as soon as lockdown started there was an explosion of PPE into the environment and every time there was a new regulation it was mirrored in the waste we found. Since the beginning of lockdown one we have found more than 1,500 PPE items in the environment. That’s a huge amount, but it’s even more when you realise that we’ve never found it before.
“It’s also a weird opportunity to see how quickly land based pollution becomes marine pollution. We always say 80% of plastic in the ocean comes from land-based sources and this made it crystal clear if you drop something in the most innermost city it will end up in the ocean, and it will impact marine life. So, it’s been an educational resource and learning opportunity, you know if you look at it glass half full.”
This mindset and message of hopeful positivity is central to Beach Guardian’s work from the tone of the educational workshops they run to how they engage with outreach activities and volunteers at their events.
Emily says: “Who is going to want to join a campaign that they think is already doomed? If I went into schools and I told them horror stories – which exist – they would be like ‘what’s the point then’?
“So, instead, we say yes, it is a huge problem that we face, but there’s eight billion of us on this planet, we can all do something. We don’t need a few people doing everything perfectly, but instead for everybody to try. If eight billion people did a beach clean today the beaches would be clean and, yes, it might come back in on the next tide, but if we do it again the next day it’s going to get less and less. We have to really focus on the small change that collectively is a global movement.”
Regarding getting involved in conservation/tackling plastic pollution Emily has three pieces of advice.
“Number one: talk about the planet. It doesn’t even have to be verbally; it can be online or making posters. Because when we talk about something, what we’re doing is literally conservation. Everybody thinks you have to take big actions to be a conservationist, but when we talk about things, it allows people to connect to something. And once you’re connected to something it’s then that you protect it, so if we keep talking about it with loads of different people then that’s more people connecting and more people protecting.”
“Number two is don’t diffuse responsibility onto someone else which is something I struggle with myself. If you’re walking down the street and see a plastic bottle on the floor don’t think that ‘somebody else is going to come along and pick it up.’ But what we have to realise is we are that somebody. When I pick up that plastic bottle, I break that cycle and change happens. If everybody else did that, those changes get bigger. Don’t forget that the action you take does make a difference!
“Then thirdly and finally do a beach clean or litter pick. If you do a litter pick in a car park at a university campus that stops it from going into the drains and into the ocean. If you clean the street outside your house or the river or the forest, it’s all protecting the wider ecosystem.”