Tramore Eco Group shows the impacts of plastic on the coastline

Clean Coasts are calling for people all over Ireland to end their relationship with single-use plastic items they thought they couldn’t live without by finding new, more sustainable items to love and sharing what some of their favourite plastic-free alternatives are! 

Waterford-based Clean Coasts group Tramore Eco-Group have been tackling plastic pollution on their local beach for a number of years.

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Through their social media channels, the group has been trying to also raise awareness about the quantity of plastic found on our coast.

The group has been finding plastic bottles, wrappers and packaging, wipes, cigarette butts and plastic toys, including some retro rubbish that dates back to up to 20 years ago.

The aim of the group is to highlight how plastic never dies and can take hundreds of years to biodegrade.

These plastic items can harm marine life, as they can get entangled in plastic items or ingest them.

As a group, reducing plastic has been top of their agenda for 5 years now.

“We contacted our Council and asked to have bins put in just for plastic bottles. We were given two that we placed at each end of the promenade here in Tramore and these are collected daily by our Council, and the bottles are sent for recycling. There was such interest in these bins the Council had more made for the Waterford Greenway and Waterford City.” said Ann Nolan, a representative of the group. 

Recent statistics show that Ireland is the number one plastic waste producer in the European Union, with 54kg of plastic waste per person produced each year, as well as being the country with the fourth-lowest recycling rate. 

Speaking about the campaign, Sinead McCoy, Clean Coasts said:

“We once again are asking people to stop and think how they are using plastic and to educate themselves about plastic and its impact.  

"If we continue with the use of plastic as a single-use item, we will continue to create immense waste issues and high demands on our natural environment.

"We need now more than ever before to discover ways to move away from the overly convenient individually packaged lifestyle we have adopted and find a way to break up with single-use plastic."

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