You may have heard the the news that we are turning trash into treasure. Alongside a number of other organisations, including our friends at Reworked and The Ocean Recovery Project, we are now able to turn the low-grade plastic waste collected on beach cleans into something useful! Our new litter picking Stations will now be made from recycled marine plastic, creating a process that is closed loop and truly circular. We are over the moon.
The next step is collecting the rubbish to kick start the production of the Stations. As a team we have decided to launch the 3 Tonne Challenge. It takes 3 tonnes of litter to create 100 Stations. Our mission is to collect this amount! We will be using our lockdown daily exercise time to collect as much plastic litter as possible from the beaches across Cornwall and Devon in the next few months.
Ever since the first beach clean it’s been on our minds to do something useful with the waste we collect and now it’s possible. Not only will it save us from using new materials to make beach clean stations in the future but we hope it will also inspire you to go and collect litter for your own stations! By turning beach waste into a resource that can be used for good instead of going to landfill or continuing to choke our oceans we have finally created a closed loop operation.
Our first litter picking Stations were made in 2014 and were placed on beaches in Devon and Cornwall. Stocked with reusable bags and litter pickers we hoped that members of the public would be encouraged to spend just 2 minutes picking up rubbish from the shoreline and sand. We were overjoyed when we realised that during the first year on the beach at Crooklets in Bude the amount of litter picked up on monthly beach cleans reduced by 61% compared to the year before. It meant the Stations were working! We now have over 900 beach cleaning, litter picking and street cleaning Stations around the UK and Ireland. They can be found on The Regent’s Canal in London, outside selected Lush Cosmetics shops, on National Trust properties, in parks and gardens all over the UK, on Dartmoor National Park and beaches all around the coast. The success of our recycled marine Station prototype has got us excited to create more and spread the message of cleaning up our world 2 minutes at a time even further.
We are also looking for sponsors to help with the project and get the recycled marine Stations rolled out across the UK and beyond. If you’re a corporate who can help fund the initiative or you have access to green transport to move the marine litter to the processor then we’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to get involved then please email Nicky on nicky@2minute.org
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