- I was the first person
to paddleboard the length of England,
and then I was the first female
to paddleboard across the English Channel.
(light splashing)
Being on the water helps me restore my health,
and now I feel like I want to give something back
and restore the health of the waterways
because they need it.
Paddleboarding was my way to tackle the plastic pollution.
(upbeat music)
(gentle lapping)
My name's Lizzie Carr.
I'm an adventurer, environmentalist and paddleboarder.
I started paddleboarding
purely as a way of getting fit again
after I was diagnosed with cancer.
The first time I put my paddle in the water,
it was like meditation.
It was this really calming, serene experience,
and then all of a sudden, I'm on the water,
and I'm seeing plastic everywhere.
On all the journeys I've done,
bottles are by far the most common thing I've found.
I think I've probably picked up thousands of these.
You see how big and how immediate
and close the problem is.
Eighty percent of marine debris starts inland,
so effectively from our water ways,
before it flows out into the oceans.
For me, it was always about
using adventure and paddleboarding
as a way to get people thinking
and talking about plastic pollution.
I decided to paddleboard the length of England
from its most southerly point
to its most northerly point
through the connected waterways network.
I started in Godalming in Surrey,
and I paddled 400 miles to Kendal in Lake District.
It took 22 days to complete,
and I photographed and logged
every single piece of plastic
that I encountered on that route.
I took over 3,000 photographs,
thousands and thousands of pieces.
What I logged was a crazy amount,
and that's not even a fraction of it.
My next adventure was paddleboarding from England
to France, so it was about 24 miles
across on the English Channel
and take water samples every fourth mile
to analyze micro-plastics.
And if you look closely,
you can find these tiny pieces of micro-plastics
where it looks like styrofoam has just broken down;
and obviously that never goes away,
and that's when it gets really dangerous
because that's when marine life confuses this for food
and they eat it.
You can see it all over.
This Saturday, we're going out in North London,
and we're doing a big clean up there with the community.
Welcome to Plastic Patrol.
And then we'll just get out on the water
and spend a couple of hours just paddling around
and looking for litter and putting it in the buckets
that we have at the front of the boards.
Over the last few years of Plastic Patrol,
we've collected 189 ton bags of plastic waste
and removed them from our water ways;
and I look at every single one like a victory.
You're seeing the very best
and the very worst of humanity.
The worst is represented by all of the plastic
and the sheer volume of plastic
that you're there clearing up,
and the best is the people trying to fix that.
I feel more proud of that
than I do of paddleboarding a distance.