AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Some rather surprising garbage recently washed up on a remote Scottish island. Stormy weather left one beach in Orkney covered in debris. But this trash was especially vintage - water bottles and other bits of plastic dating back as far as the 1960s, and some of it came from Canada, thousands of miles away. David Warner organizes beach cleanups on the island and made the discovery. He's also the creative sustainability coordinator at the Sanday Community Craft Hub. Welcome to the program.
DAVID WARNER: Hi there.
RASCOE: This isn't the first time you found trash washed up on local beaches, but what's so different about this latest cleanup?
WARNER: Just the sheer volume of litter. We quite often get beaches full of rubbish month by month, most of it from around the world. You can trace it back. But this time, it was the sheer volume.
RASCOE: And a lot of it is older, though, right?
WARNER: Yeah. So due to the dunes being eroded with the such bad weather due to climate change, a lot of the rubbish from the '60s and '70s is just washed out, and that's been covered for years. That's what's shocking about it. Just it looks like somebody's just dumped bags onto the beach and all these bottles.
RASCOE: So how will you clean it up?
WARNER: Me and a group of beach cleaners do it regular anyway, so we went out and cleaned it all up. The bottles were quite easy to clean up, whereas the polystyrene pieces were quite scary and quite significant. Just in one area, it was 1,094 pieces. So we scaled that up, and that's 306,000 pieces on that beach.
RASCOE: Oh, OK. How does this make you feel to see, you know, all of this trash wash up on these pristine, beautiful beaches?
WARNER: So the first time since I've beach cleaned, this is the first time I felt so overwhelmed by it. It suddenly seemed like the problem was a lot bigger than us and anything we could ever do. That's why I wanted to get the message out there and try and raise awareness because the island's full of people that have moved here for several reasons, but mainly everyone's sort of attitudes towards protecting the environment and being nature-centric is so strong here. And that's why I came here, and seeing this, it hits you deeply that actually, we are such a problem towards this environment.
RASCOE: Obviously, it's devastating to see the beaches like this, but did you find anything interesting in some of the trash that you've seen wash up on shore?
WARNER: Yes. That's why I love doing this. It's quite overwhelming at times when you see all this plastic, but it's so interesting to find the story, and we often get lots of interesting things. Like, we find things from Japan, dolls' heads, and we get lobster tags from Newfoundland where we can see what ship it's come from. But this time it was - were lots of bottles, pre-decimalisation here in the U.K., so that's pre-1971, guaranteed. Things that are no longer in use - there was a Canadian maple syrup bottle. I did some research. That was from Canada. So it is quite interesting, the things you find.
RASCOE: So what would you do with all this plastic once you get the beaches as clear as you can?
WARNER: I don't really want to send it to landfill because it's not solving the problem. It's still on the earth. And actually, lots of issues with landfill in terms of it gets to landfill and falls into the sea from the boats it's transported by. So I think the best option would be to create some sort of artistic sculpture as a project (ph) with the community to sort of continue raising awareness of this problem.
RASCOE: That's David Warner. He's the creative sustainability coordinator at the Sanday Community Craft Hub. Thank you.
WARNER: Thank you. Thank you for your time.
(SOUNDBITE OF OGHAM SCOTTISH FOLD MUSIC'S "ORKNEY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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