A Trip of 2 Halves

This was successful overall. We built some new bridges (First Half). . . but unfortunately probably burnt some others (Second Half).

Overall Trip Summary

Below are key numerical take outs from 2025 beach cleaning trip:

• 3 Times More Effective – Headcount vs Weight of Plastic Removed thanks to use of Quad Bike
• 1.4 Tons – Plastic Removed
• Cost to Charity – £479
• 1kg Removed – For every £0.34 Spent
• 72 – Number of Chicken Nuggets Eaten on 9th July
• 19 Years – Age of Rubber Duck found by SC on Beach

There is a fictional number in there somewhere, can you spot it.

First Half

The first half of the trip was very conventional this year. We went spent the first 2 days picking up mountains of rubbish from the same very long beach as last year near Port William in Galloway.

We did very well on  this first couple of,  days there was a lot of plastic, and witht he help of the Quad Bike loaned to us for free by Hunda UK (Thanks Iain!) we were able to shift about 600kg on the first day. On the second day we managed 800kg approx, bring our total up to 1.4kg.

This photos shows two things:

1. That i am going slightly bald, which is rather annoying.
2. That we weigh the plastic so we can report back on how your money is being spent in a meaningful way.

As well as the 2 Will’s on the trip this year we were very lucky to have Shona along with us, she was a very hardworking beach cleaner and a Journalist to boot. Shona wrote a great article about her weekend beach cleaning with our small plastic pollution charity for her Newspaper “The National”.

Shona found something quite interesting on the beach. It was a rubber duck launched from Ireland in 2006, apparently some of these duck have ended up a lot further afield in Norway and places like that. Details of this are in her article.

So that was the end of a successful couple of days. Time to move on to meet with a much larger group at Arrochar. . . . . . if we had stayed on the Port William beach I think we would have smashed the record of the year before thanks to the Honda Quad Bike. Even with 2 of us we could have kept up 0.5 tons a day for the remainder of the 3 days. Perhaps getting around 3 tons in total. . . . I say this because of what happened at the next beach.

Second Half

So  buoyed up by the first half of the trip. And memories of the full skip. Will and I started off for Arrochar the next day. It was a great drive.

However, it was on our arrival that things started to unwind.

I should state for clarity here I am not blaming anyone except myself for my weak leadership in what happened. I don’t carry ill will towards by self about it, but technically I had managed this second half of  the trip very poorly.

We arrived at Arrochar and found that the beach had very little plastic on it. So the realisation hit me that we had just wasted the second half of the trip. With 15 people coming tomorrow (Sincere apologies to you Fraser) and hardly anything for them to do.

Combine this with the fact that we had  just left a really badly polluted beach, where we were doing great guns with the use of the Quad bike. . . I suffered from a collapse of resolve, and emailed to cancel the second half of the trip.

What did I learn.

When you are managing a beach clean you must insist that volunteers come to the beach _you_ want to clean. In the face of goodwill from groups of volunteers is it quite easy to acquiesce to their requests (“can we clean a beach closer to where we live?”) and in doing so lose your direction.

If you look back though the project posts and look as to why we chose Galloway it was because it is remote, and very badly polluted, and that why we can offer such good value for money to our donors.

I think the epitome of this when a representative from DHL contacted us to organise a beach clean . . . for 2 hours (One hour either side of lunchtime) in North West Wales, and they wanted to fit in a picnic lunch in at the same time. Obviously we turned that “opportunity” down.

The above is quite a extreme example, but the group who had volunteered to come this year had the previous year proved themselves to be hard working and good company, and perhaps this is why I took a wrong step.

Anyway. Here’s to next year.

Thank You!

Thanks yous

• Thanks to our main donors this year.
• Thanks to Iain from Honda UK for your consistent help in organising the provision and transport of the quad bike. It made a huge difference.
• Thanks to Will for your reliability and also emotional support on last day!
• Thanks to Shona for your amazing article and the hard graft.
• Thanks to the lady at Gloucester services who gave me an extra sausage, without me even having to ask. You read my mind.