Beachwatch 

Beachwatch is a long running beach litter monitoring project by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS). Monitoring is undertaken through surveying / cleaning events, where volunteers record the litter found over 100-metres of beach strandline (Beachwatch Team, n.d.). The Great British Beach Clean, a component of Beachwatch, takes place over a week in September where citizens nationwide are encouraged to get involved with Beachwatch cleans. The week’s legacy is one of the longest running beach litter monitoring records worldwide, having been on the go for three decades (Beachwatch Team, n.d.). With this vast archive of evidence, the MCS has a powerful voice when campaigning for legislative changes relating to marine pollution.

Recent Results:
While the 30-year record of Beachwatch data is not available online, plenty of recent findings are discussed in the MCS annual reports and website. Figure 1 displays the upward trend in litter collected by the MCS over the last five years. This total combines Great British Beach Cleans with other Beachwatch projects like Team beach cleans and school/youth group cleans. Over both 2022/23 and 2023/24, the total amount of litter collected reached 17 tonnes. 

As of 2023, an annual ‘Beachwatch Report’ has been released every spring. A few headlines from the most recent 2023 report are summarised below (Marine Conservation Society, 2024a):
- Of the 17,208kg of litter collected in 2023, 17% consisted of single-use plastic.
- The volume of litter collected across 2023 rose by over a 5th in comparison to 2022, reaching over 480,000 items.
- 2023 achieved the MCS's highest number of annual litter surveys yet, at over 1,100. 

To condider the longer term picture of UK beach pollution, there are signs of both positive and negative change. For example, while plastic bags observations have decline by 4/5th thanks to the 5p charge (Beachwatch Team, n.d.), drink related items have now become the most prominent type of beach litter, with only 3% of cleans failing to find something in this category (Common, 2024). The overall picture though is a hopeful one, with an ongoing general decrease in beach litter since 2016 (Beachwatch Team, n.d.). 

Achievements:
These are some of the notable changes that have come about as a direct result of Beachwatch findings and lobbying by the MCS:
- As of 2023, a ban on certain single-use plastic has been passed in England and Wales, thanks to Great British Beach Clean evidence of its prevalence as a beach pollutant (Marine Conservation Society, 2023)
- In 2021, Beachwatch research found many brands of wet wipe to contain high volumes of plastic, while also finding them to be a significant pollutant of the country’s beaches (Marine Conservation Society, 2022). As of 2024, thanks to this research, such wet wipes have been banned from sale across the whole country (Marine Conservation Society, 2024b).

To learn about the EGCP’s locally based beach cleaning project, please see our pages on ‘Turning the Plastic Tide’.