Swanage Beach Buddies

Swanage Beach Buddies’ beach cleans complement Swanage Town Council’s great work keeping Central and South Beach clean throughout the year. Whether it’s during the summer when the beaches host hundreds of thousands of visitors, or the autumn and winter when gales can bring up huge quantities of marine litter, we’re able to give the beaches deep cleans and extra TLC and help raise awareness of plastic pollution.

Types of rubbish include:

• bottles • plastic cutlery • cotton bud sticks • forgotten shoes • broken beach toys • clothing • dangerous fishing hooks and line • whelk traps • rope • fishermen’s gloves • nurdles (plastic pellets used in manufacturing) • balloons • cans • wet wipes • cigarette stubs • a 7’ long seat cushion from a yacht • champagne corks and wires • toothbrushes • sunglasses • dog poo bags • abandoned barbecues

We give talks about litter to local schools, several of which run the global Eco Schools programme, and we also organise special beach cleans for Year 7s at Swanage School, and for the Green Team at St Mary’s Catholic Primary School. Family groups from St George’s CE Primary School, Langton Matravers, and St Mark’s CE School, Swanage, have also joined our group beach cleans. One of our beach cleans in 2018 saw 56 people turn out to prove that many hands make light work, some even coming from Blandford and Poole to do their bit for Swanage Beach.

In 2018, we arranged for Wayne Dixon, Keep Britain Tidy’s No. 1 Litter Hero, who is walking the UK coast picking litter, to give a talk to St Mary’s Primary School, inspiring the next generation to care for their environment even more. We are informally twinned with Kissamos Beach Cleaners in NW Crete, one of whose members we learned later grew up in Swanage!

We’re keen for this group to grow and to do this we’d need to recruit more beach clean leaders and assistant leaders.

Co-Ordinator: Dave Pratten, swanagebeachbuddies@gmail.com

Mission: While Litter-free Purbeck is working with Litter Free Dorset to stop plastic pollution at source, we will be removing marine litter and dropped litter from our beaches for a while yet. We’d love your help whether it’s for two hours, a year, or more, so please get in touch.

How Are We Doing?
Please see below details of the number of volunteers we’ve had, and the massive amount of litter we’ve removed at our events.

TOP TIP: When viewing the table below on a mobile phone turn the phone horizontally or you can slide the table left and right with your finger.