-The world’s problems are overwhelming.
If you can manage one small part of it, then maybe you can
start to believe that actually you can manage quite a lot of it.
The 2 Minute beach clean was a project that came about just because I was
walking on a beach in Devon, and I was wading through plastic bottles.
I was so furious, and as someone who loved the beach,
I couldn’t believe that it was being so trashed.
In 2013, we had a really bad storm here in North Cornwall.
It was called Hercules.
The rubbish that was left after it was just horrendous.
I was walking on Crooklets Beach and just picked up a bag
of rubbish and just thought, "I’ll pick up this one,
and then I’ll go back and get another one."
This idea started forming in my mind that we need to use
a bit of human nature, and we can use the internet,
social media to try and encourage people to come down and help.
Everybody’s got a couple of minutes. You can’t refuse it.
The idea was that we’ll just ask people for two
minutes of their time to do a little beach clean.
If we get enough people to do beach cleans in between the big
beach cleans, then actually it’ll make the big beach cleans easier.
If we get enough people to do it, then actually
we won’t have to do big beach cleans at all.
The beach clean stations on the beach is where you’ve got
litter pickers and bags, and you could borrow a bag and off you go.
We trialed it on the beach here in Bude.
Six years later, we’ve got nearly 900 of them around the UK.
In that first year of that beach clean station being on Crooklets Beach,
there was a 61% drop in the amount of litter that was being picked
up by the beach cleans and so the idea that hang on a second,
we’ve got 900 beaches and each beach is hopefully resulting
in a 61% drop in the litter that’s being picked up on those beaches.
Then we’re making a difference.
-Come on, then.
-Well, then, Simon, welcome to the beach of Bude.
-Thank you.
-We’re going to go and see a place that the locals call
Crap Cove, which is a gathering spot for plastics and ocean-borne debris.
I thought you might find it quite interesting.
I imagine you’ve seen some grubby beaches in your time.
-I’ve seen a fair bit of grubby planet, yes.
-Exactly. This place generally is pretty clean, but for some reason,
all the swell and all the plastic seems to end up here from
all around, which is easier if you want to clean it but quite
heartbreaking when you go out there and you think,
"Oh, I can only manage a certain amount."
-I haven’t seen a lot of that in this country.
I’ve seen some really, really dirty beaches, beaches that are rapidly
becoming plastic beaches, frankly,
which has shocked and deeply upset me, actually.
-I can imagine it would.
-I suppose perhaps this year, this summer, having been closer to home,
I’ve seen a bit more of the reality we face in this country as well.
Can we talk about how things have changed?
In the first 10 years of the 21st-century, we created
more plastic than in the entirety of the 20th century.
Our creation and use and disposal of plastic is increasing still
exponentially year after year, and more and more of it is going into the sea.
Are you seeing that on beaches here when you’re surfing?
-In terms of what we’re picking up, we’re seeing
smaller stuff, lots and lots of smaller stuff.
The stuff that’s historically been on the beaches
is breaking down into smaller bits.
The beach cleaners are picking up this stuff because it’s big,
but actually, when you start to dig in the pebbles here,
that’s where probably the bulk of it is.
-My job and responsibility, very lucky me, has been
traveling around this planet and trying to make a little bit
of sense while I’m on my journeys of what on earth is going on out there.
I have found myself on, well, any number of beaches
but in particular, I would think of a beach in Hawaii,
which are islands in the middle of nowhere, of course, in the Pacific,
and we went to this remote beach, on this remote island that was,
to my absolute horror, rapidly becoming a plastic beach.
By that I mean, yes, as you were saying, exactly, there was the big
pieces of plastic on the surface, but as you started to dig down,
you found all these tiny fragments of plastic.
That was when the hair started going up on the back of my neck, and I feel
a bit of a lump in my throat as I think of it now because it was such
an emotional awakening as I realized what we are doing as a species
to our planet because, of course, this plastic does not biodegrade,
and it will be transformed in front of our eyes into something
that is fundamentally different and I would say a bit poisoned.
-Well, it’s toxic because of the nature of its makeup, it’s carbon.
Fish are attracted to small bits of plastic, and seagulls
are attracted to small bits of plastic because of the nature
of the chemicals that they attract natural pollutants and actually,
it smells like food to them so then anything that eats
that or anything that eats the fish that eats the small bits.
Eventually, it will come back to us.
I think every sample of mussels sampled in UK waters has got microfiber in it.
That’s terrifying because we eat mussels.
That means that we are eating our own mess, awful toxins entering
our body and we’re doing it to ourselves, for crying out loud.
-Do you think it’s a fundamental problem with human psychology?
I’ve been with indigenous people in incredibly remote parts of the world.
I remember being with the Kogi people in a very remote part of Colombia.
They’re very spiritually connected with Mother Nature and the land, yet
we went with them to see a power station that was a long distance away,
and they stopped, and they bought some plastic water bottles.
Then after they’d finished drinking one of the bottles, the plastic film
that was holding the bottles together, I saw one of them just chuck it away.
I thought, "Oh my goodness." I couldn’t believe it.
I went over to pick it up in a bit of a huff and [?].
Then we had an anthropologist with us.
He was looking after them and protecting them from us.
He said, "Oh, I think they knew I would pick that up."
I thought, "Oh my goodness, isn’t that the problem?
We all think somebody else is going to clear up after us?"
-Somebody else is going to sort it out.
-How do we change that mindset?
-I don’t know. We try and understand what makes us human.
These are fundamental human traits, aren’t they?
We’re too lazy to deal with stuff.
We want to get on with the exciting things rather than dealing with the rubbish.
We just need to learn. We need to learn what we’re doing.
-People don’t see the consequences of their actions, generally, do they?
We are quite disconnected from where our stuff comes
from and where it goes after we finish with it.
I’ve met, for example, this very bemused village lady
on an island off the coast of Kenya, near the Somali border.
She was so baffled about, where is all this plastic rubbish coming from?
There, they were picking up flip-flops by the hundred
every day, and she said to me, "We don’t understand.
They started turning up a few years ago.
Now more and more of them come, where are they coming from?"
She was in a very disconnected part of the planet.
They didn’t have the internet there.
They weren’t able to read the Guardian online, but she was
experiencing the consequences of our throwaway
[crosstalk] disposable society.
Just as a little bit of hope in the situation, her community was
actually gathering up the flip-flops and molding them into art projects,
like creating an enormous dolphin and elephants
and selling them to art galleries. It was brilliant and beautiful.
That was just one place where they were doing it, there were a thousand
beaches further down the coast where the rubbish was just rolling in.
-Having seen some of the things that you must have seen on your travels,
do you manage to keep a positive spin on it, or how
do you cope personally, with seeing all this stuff?
-I’d say with varying degrees of success is how I cope.
I suppose I never want to be unaffected by it.
I get very emotional about it, actually, sometimes,
the more so the more humans are involved in it. I do get angry.
I do cry a bit when I see something horrific, definitely, but I still like
to think we’re not quite at the brink, and we could pull ourselves back,
but my goodness, we’re getting close.
-How do we come back from that because,
as an individual, what can we do? Is it possible?
Is it in our power to do anything about this stuff?
-We are fantastically powerful, actually.
Together, collectively, and individually, we do have a lot of power, not
just through the internet, of course, but through how we spend our money,
through how we vote, through the causes and the issues
that we get behind and we promote and we support.
Yes, we do have a lot of individual and collective
power, and I think we should be using that more
deliberately and with more understanding and focus.
Yes, it can be not buying the vegetables that are unnecessarily wrapped
in plastic, but it can also be on a more fundamental level, saying,
‘‘We don’t want to go on like this.’’ The companies
that are creating a lot of this don’t want to be doing it,
they’re there just trying to make money
and feed their employees, families, as well.
We need a more focused community national response to it.
There has been some talk of people putting filters through
the sea, of projects to sieve out plastic from the ocean.
Whenever I’ve heard that suggested or people have said it to me, I just
think it’s inconceivable to me that anything we create as humans could
possibly deal with the scale of the amount of plastic we have put into our seas.
We cannot sieve it out, we’ve got to stop it from going
into the sea and into our soil, in the first place.
-Everybody wants to carry on as they were and hope that someone else
will sort it out for them, whereas my project is, well, hang on a second,
we’ve got to get everybody on board with this.
We know that plastic emits climate change gases, we know that this is
a climate change problem, as well as just a pollution and plastic problem,
yet the corporations, they’re piling their money into petrochemicals,
which is plastic, and they’re selling us this idea that recycling is
good because it allows them to keep making stuff.
Actually, recycling is not the answer, we’ve just got to stop using it.
Don’t use it, then if you don’t use it, it won’t exist.
Let’s get back to where we come from.
Fjällräven produce bags out of twelve, I think, of bottles like this.
Actually, there are uses for it, and there are people that are trying to do good.
-When they see, okay, this is made from recycled plastic bottles-
-It has a value.
--that is so much better for us and our planet than
something that’s just being made from raw petrochemicals.
For generations now, we’ve all been told, "You could do anything,
be anything, have what you want, consume what you want."
Actually, now I think we need to get to a more sustainable model where
we’re buying more thoughtfully, we’re buying stuff that actually lasts,
it does a proper job for a proper period of time, and isn’t
chucked away after a day, a week, a month, a year.
I hope that’s the direction of travel that we’re going in,
but if it’s not the direction the public go to, then yes,
I absolutely think the government should be leading and guiding
us on that because that’s what leadership should be about.
We need a greener, better future that’s more sustainable.
-I believe that we have power as consumers because this is a consumer
society, and if we decide that we don’t want it, then it won’t be available,
but then you’ve got a massive job of educating a huge number of people
who love to get fast fashion items and who love to get cheap clothes.
They have little value because they are so cheap, but just
they’re good because they’re new whereas actually, hopefully,
people like you and I will buy things because they’re made to last.
I’ve got a pair of socks on that are called long-last socks,
and they last for years, and they’re made of wool, it’s sustainable,
and they’re just really beautifully made.
The sad thing is they are quite expensive, so actually--
They’re better than buying 10 pairs of rubbishy
ones that are going to wear through every week or so.
[music]
Having learned a bit about what you’re doing and why you do it,
I would just like to say that I really want to sign up myself,
I really want to do it myself.
I really want to encourage people watching this to log on to your website
and get involved and do it as well because it’s a brilliant idea.
It’s a real necessity.
I think it’s almost a requirement because
we need to reclaim our seas from the rubbish.
We need to recognize what the problem is, we all need to get in touch with
it and understand that this stuff is all of our consumption and creation.
We’re all responsible for it, whether we know it or not.
We all need to be involved in picking it up and stop
it from going in the sea, in the first place.
[music]