A short film produced by Loughborough University hopes to highlight the issue of coastal pollution on the Isle of Skye and the efforts of researchers and environmentalists who are fighting to keep the beaches clean.
Working closely with local groups, the team of scientists from Loughborough, Nottingham and Keele visited the island’s remote shores last summer to analyse the extent of the litter washed up by ocean currents.
It comes after lead researcher Dr Tom Stanton found a 50-year-old academic paper which warned about the impact of plastics and rubbish being brought Skye by sea.
The film, 50 years of litter on Skye, follows the team as they discover isolated beauty spots such as Camasunary that are carpeted in plastics and discarded fishing equipment.
The aim of the project is to find new techniques for mapping polluted beaches, including with drones, to see if the true extent of the rubbish can be measured.
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[Instrumental] 50 years ago, an academic called Gerald Scott went to the Isle of Skye and surveyed some beaches. In this paper he talked about sites requiring a degree of scrambling ability that precluded the everyday picnic or something along those lines. I read this paper when I was a master’s student and thought….
Oh, how cool would it be to go back there, see how it’s changed and be able to go scrambling for my own research on the idea since then. And then I saw this funding opportunity come up from the Sea Changers Innovation Fund and I thought, Oh, it’s 2022, that’s 50 years ago
From that paper, I wonder how it’s changed over 50 years. And so myself and one of my colleagues, Melissa Schiele, came up with a project where we would go and look at the litter as it is today, use survey techniques that weren’t available to Gerald Scott,
Such as the flying of drones and really accurate GPS logging, and then also talk to members of the community who have been on the island, not necessarily for 50 years, but over enough time to give us a picture of how litter on the island might have changed.
We systematically go through with a team, look for the different plastics, and then I’m in charge of marking everything down, and then later on we transpose all this information into the Excel spreadsheets. So many of our beaches… particularly right at the back to the beaches. It’s these small chunks that we keep finding.
You can see this bit’s been cut here. We’ve got another cut here. And then what’s cut off is what’s washing up. And we’ve been pulling these nets out. We were at a site a few days ago where we pulled one of these out in almost pristine condition apart from the soil.
And it came along with crisp packets that were dated to 1998, 1999 just preserved looking brand new because it’s not been exposed to the elements to degrade. We quite often see these shorter lengths of rope in the mouths of cows.
So we’ve seen that a couple of times – they’re in the grazing areas. We’ve got sheep just here. The sheep’s foot is on a piece of plastic. We found it under a sheep’s foot. It was transported up on to the very high beach
By wind and wave and… was sort of working its way into the soil. And a sheep that was grazing was standing on it. We sort of looked over and it was a very improbable maroon colour. Here it’s mostly fishing gear. Ropes, twines… I mean, I’m looking here now. Yeah, fishing net pieces…
Zero to 50 centimetres. Fishing rope. Fine twines which [is] basically bits that have broken off old nets and things like that. String, cord and actual pieces of plastic has been quite small. We’ve taken a one-by-one transect so it’s a quadrat and we are going through the seaweed
And we’re pulling out all the smaller plastics we can see. Dr Tom Stanton has a wonderful eye and he sees all sorts of microbes. So this is another piece of fishing net, a much smaller strand, just like the other beach we were at.
It’s either broken away from the net or it could have been cut out at sea and it’s washed up. But this is the sort of thing we’ve seen at every single beach that we’ve been on. One of the most common types of litter, always is very distinctive green as well.
Part of it is rethinking what we do with waste chains and waste management so we don’t have bins tipping over in Mallaig and coming across the water and part of it is actually empowering people to collect some information so they can identify where things are coming from.
We can talk to companies about extended producer responsibility and what the fate of their actual packaging is. There’s a lot that can be done with alternative plastic-type materials that do break down. So we don’t need to make the wrapper of a candy bar
Out of something that’s going to last for two or 300 years. Actually, six or eight months might be fine. A lot of the issues that we were dealing with are around industrial design and we need to get industrial designers motivated, which means getting companies regulated.
And in order to do that, we need data. And that’s why we’re here with the scientific team. But we also need community support and contribution. So the community science angle is really, really important for this project. The impact of this litter is quite varied. It depends on the type of the litter,
The size of the litter and where it is as well. So on the beach we’re at today. We’ve already seen sheep grazing amongst the litter. Those sheep will almost certainly be exposed to small bits of plastic. We’ve been on our hands and knees
Picking up pieces of plastic smaller than a centimetre in size. They could be ingesting it now that size for a sheep is not really problematic, but bits of rope could be causing blockages of their stomachs. It’s certainly distressing for the animal as well,
But then beyond the physical impacts, there’s also the chemical impact. So even those small bits of plastic have chemicals that might be leaching out of them from their production. But if they’ve come from the sea, there’s all sorts of chemical pollution in the ocean that can be sticking to the small plastic particles.
And then when it’s inside an organism, that organism is exposed to those. Now the health impacts of that are not well-studied. They’re certainly there. We know that they are problematic, but just how much and at what sort of scale… We’re still in the early days of trying to understand.
So what we’ve got here is a piece of aquaculture gear. This has come from one of the salmon farms around the island and we believe it’s used for feeding. So the fire feeding pellets down these tubes into the salmon farms, these are obviously very problematic.
They’re washing up all over the island in different sizes. The one that I’ next to here is over 25 metres long. What you can’t see is that these are really degraded on the outside. So they’re washing ashore and they’re being gradually broken down
Through the action of the pebbles and the rocks that are on the beaches that they’re moving across. And they’re clearly breaking up into very, very small pieces at the surface. So this is introducing microplastic particles onto the beaches. These are then going to be washing out into the sea.
But it’s not just the outside… so on the inside of these tubes they’re also really abraded and there’s been some work looking at whether or not the way that the food is introduced to the salmon farms is potentially abrading the inside of these tubes,
Meaning that the feeding process is also introducing microplastics out at sea. We are going out on the water to look at whether there is any microplastics or microfibres that are coming off of the litter that we find in the beaches or from the aquaculture that is used in these sea lochs.
Today we managed to get out on the paddleboards, which was great, and we took those surface samples, but we also took samples through depth. So we took samples at five, 10, 15 and 20 metres. The reason that we’re taking them at those depths
Is to have a look at how the water column is being mixed and how plastics and fibres might be moved through the system. But also we have a really big fish farm aquaculture going on in this loch, so we’re interested
To see if that is a particular source in comparison to some of our other sites that don’t have such a direct proximity to one of those sorts of industries. We’re collecting 10 litres of water and we filtered those down and then we have a filter paper
That collects all of the plastics and fibres on it. And that’s what we’ll take back to the lab to analyse. This is an infrared microscope. We can take a chemical signature – a chemical spectrum from different materials and see what types of chemicals they are. So we use this to look at plastic.
So this is a passive feeding tube that’s been washed ashore. And we’ve been looking at this is the reference sample, comparing it to microplastics that are found on the beach and then see near where this washed up to see chemically if they are similar.
Obviously, this looks like a feeding tube, microplastics look like tiny dots, so down the microscope… we can look and see if they look similar. This just allows us to see if it’s chemically similar or not, and we have a sample library so we can run the spectrum through a sample library and check.
And in this case, the lower spectrum here is the reference spectrum. And from here this is the known reference up to the sample at the top, which is the microplastics. We can run this bottom one here… I can try and do it live for you…
We can run it through and see which sample it is, and therefore it’s come out with a 91 per cent match to a particular polymer from this polymer library. So that gives us a really good idea that that is our sample of interest. As an area we’re very much known
For the beauty of the land and the sea. In that regard I think you were talking earlier that you had visited a beach the other day, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to, Camasunary and you walk onto the beach and it’s shocking. It’s really shocking.
The level of waste that has just ended up in this one place because of the tides. You know, it’s not being washed back out again. We had a look at what was there. It was the worst we’d seen. It was just really, really dense. And we were combing through it.
We found a load of lobster tags from North America, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, bilingual. I recognised them immediately, but we also found heaps of shotgun shells. So it actually has got ‘Grand PR’ written on it. So we’ve got a brand. Wherever we can we’re taking the brands
To try and work out provenance, but also if possible, to look at these environmental social governance statements. But these shotgun cartridges we’ve been finding all over every single beach, in some cases numbering over 200 in one of our small 10-metre wide survey areas. And I was told by a local
A story of some of these shotgun cartridges washing up on the Outer Hebrides. So Harrison Lewis and then being reported to the local police who found out that they had come from the USA. The local police apparently reported it to the Met.
The Met took it to the FBI in the US, who then tracked the batch numbers of these shotgun cartridges down to a Canadian source who got in touch with the Mounties and the mountain police service went to the actual store and the store said, yeah, people go off the coast
Of Nova Scotia shooting and that’s how they’d washed up on the Outer Hebrides. It wasn’t an illegal arms trade as was first thought. So these come a long way. They could be local, but a lot of them do come. So it’s Nova Scotians shooting things into the water. Yeah, that sounds like home.
I take full responsibility. We did a little one metre by one metre quadrat in several different parts of the beach. And at the worst, we found 1,061 pieces of litter. And the way the wind and the tide work, it’s all being driven in there.
But we we can see by the amount of North American rubbish that it’s picking up something that’s coming across in the Gulf Stream, but it’s also getting a lot of fishing waste likely from the Irish Sea. So I am looking at
The lobster tags and fish tags that we found on beaches in Skye and I’m looking at the numbers and the letters on the tags and from that you can see where abouts they came from. So this tag, for example, it says ‘M.E.’ on it, and that’s the letters that show it’s from Maine.
And then there’s other numbers on there which can show you where on the coastline in Maine it came from. So this one is in zone C, which will be down here, and then it’s got the year on it as well. So we know this tag in particular came from 2005.
So it’s been out and about for a while. They’re all from the same coastline, but there’s ones from Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But then there’s also the ones from Canada. So a lot of these ones here are from Canada. l then this one is from Ireland and there’s more in here
From the UK, Scotland and England. So Emily, how do Sky Beach Cleans record the litter that they find around Skye and are there any challenges that they’ve had trying to do that? Yeah, with difficulty is the answer to the first question.
We’ve been using the MCS protocols, but because the beaches here are so bad, they’ve allowed us to try and count what’s in 10 metres. So we used our logging protocols which are in line with OS Bar. But there’s so much litter on all of the beaches that we try
And count, it’s really, really difficult. And you can easily spend like hours just like five of you on a 10-metre stretch. If you’ve got a lot of really, really littered beaches. Is there any way that you could potentially speed things up? So, for example, would flying drones over a beach
To have a look at the litter be the sort of thing that people on the island would be potentially happy to try? Yeah, I can definitely see it’s got potential. There’s loads of bits of Skye that are completely inaccessible by land
Or you’ve got to take a quad bike and you have to access them by sea. And we don’t really know what litter is on those beaches. So there could be huge bits of litter that washed up that we don’t know anything about and having a drone and understanding
What’s there instead of me zooming in on satellite images and just trying to see what might be likely, will be really useful so that we can be more targeted where we actually have got a boat to come and clean things up. Okay, I’m taking off now. Drone: “Take off.”
Some of the beaches in Skye are pretty inaccessible. And one of the things you can do with drones is that you can fly to those beaches and basically take photographs or take film and then you’ll be able to understand using the data
That we’ve gathered on the beaches, how much litter is actually kind of in there. If you’ve got imagery of a remote beach using the data we’re gathering on all the other beaches, we’ll start to be able to get a picture
Of how much litter would be there, say, after a year or two years. What that will mean is we’ll be able to inform strategy. So essentially, how many people do we need to go and send to clean that beach? When we take a survey with the drone, we take a series
Of overlapping images with the camera on the drone, pointing straight down. Those over overlapping images can be merged into a single image that we call an orthomosaic. With that orthomosaic, the scale is uniform across that image. So we call that photogrammetry, which is the process of taking measurements from images.
It is actually quite easy for members of the public to use these drones. There are obviously lots of regulations. The CAA controls airspace, but if you’re flying a drone under 250 grams, it’s much easier to be flying that drone. So without too much training,
It’s possible for members of the public to pick it up pretty quickly. The work that the residents are doing in the Isle of Skye is absolutely fantastic. There are a few key groups. Without them we wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing. We’ve surveyed eight beaches.
Can you tell us a little bit about how having people, teams of scientists coming in and surveying the island can help you and how it fits with what you’re doing? Yeah, it’s so important to have research and have hard data because it’s really difficult to collect that.
I’ve been trying really hard to collect MCS data and it’s a really difficult way to do things. The other thing that’s really important is that locals’ voices need to be heard. People here really, really care about this and the people on this island,
Aren’t the people that are putting this litter on our beaches, that is not where it’s coming from. So it’s really important to have you all come in, understand what’s going on and have a complete outside perspective and be able
To represent Skye and its best light and really stand up for everyone’s voices here that have been shouting into the void for a long time about this problem. The bin you’re standing next to… People have been mistaking it for a beach-side bin. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
So looking at the top of this, it seems like it’s come from right across the water. So it’s probably about 10 miles, but it says Lochaber. So actually it’s probably farther than that, it’s maybe about 30 or 40 miles over the water
And has washed up and people have found it, stood it up and decided that rather than taking their rubbish home or leaving it, they’ve been putting it in here and hopefully today we’ll be taking that away with us. All of this is going
To go to the Armadale Estate and the other one I’m going to take to Skye Beach Cleans. And the small bag we’ll take to Skye Beach Cleans as well. They’ll recycle whatever they can. Particularly the net. So unfortunately most of it’s going to have to go to landfill.
While we were there, we were surveying nine beaches and across those beaches we have logged 13,909 pieces of litter and we reckon that we’ve we’ve come away having cleared somewhere between one and a half and two tonnes of litter. We’re also going to be hopefully
Placing our findings into bigger policies and bigger pieces of legislation. So for example, the deposit return scheme for bottles at the moment it’s really got stuck in the mud. The nature of what’s being proposed is very plastic focused. We’re absolutely advocating for an all in deposit return scheme
And the data that we’ve collected from Skye, when we put that into the context of some of the other work that we’ve been doing across mainland UK really shows that we can’t just focus on plastics. There’s lots of other materials out there
And we need to be bringing this in sooner rather than later. The powers that be need to stop twiddling their thumbs and get on with it. So we really want to be able to use this data to call for faster action. We’re not going to change the world on our own,
But we’re hopefully going to be part of the picture. What I want people to take home from this work is that we’re all connected to these distant, remote environments, a lot more than we perhaps might realise. Those connections can be really indirect.
You might not see the types of litter that we’re finding on these beaches in the supermarkets, but they’re still linked to a lot of the things that you can buy… fish, for example we’re seeing so many nets, so much aquaculture gear. We want to help equip people with the knowledge
To make informed consumer choices with the environment in mind. 50 years ago, Gerald Scott was telling us that if we don’t change our behaviours our beaches are going to be overrun with with litter. And of course that’s exactly what happened. We weren’t listening to what the academics and the scientists were telling us
50 years ago, and we’re still not listening to enough of the science. We need to do a lot more than we are doing. I think one of the things that this project has shown is that we can’t just listen to the science. We also need to listen to the people
Who are living with the problems that have been foreshadowed for so long.