The UK’s leading marine charity, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), is looking for thousands of volunteers to clean up the nation’s beaches as part of its 25th anniversary Great British Beach Clean event (14th-17th September).

The Great British Beach Clean, now in its 25th year, not only spruces up hundreds of beaches around the coast, but volunteers also record the litter they find, and it’s this aspect that has really helped MCS change policy and behaviours over the last quarter of a century.

The 5p carrier bag charge, a ban on microbeads, consultations on a plastic tax and deposit return schemes, reduction in the use of plastic straws – all have come about following compelling evidence gathered at MCS beach cleans.

The 2017 event saw almost 7,000 volunteer beach cleaners pick up record amounts of litter from 339 UK beaches.

Beach litter has steadily risen over the 24 years since MCS began recording it. However, there was some good news last year because the number of single-use plastic bags found on UK beaches almost halved between 2015 and 2016. MCS says this was almost certainly due to the charges at the checkout and shows the impact that behaviour change can have on beach litter.

In 2017, ’on the go’ items made up 20% of all litter found on the UK’s beaches. MCS categorises cardboard cups, plastic cutlery, foil wrappers, straws, sandwich packets, and so on as ’on the go’. The amount of litter suggests we’re treating the outdoors as a big dustbin.

Cleaning and surveying a beach only takes a couple of hours at most. Each beach has a co-ordinator, who explains how to fill in a simple data form, and then it’s just a case of grabbing a litter picker and a bin bag and filling it up with rubbish. Visit www.mcsuk.org for more information.