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Activism

This weeks momentous movement of activism in Scotland has continued with collective actions both on the streets and on the beaches!

Peoples Climate March

As I joined thousands of people on the Princes Street in Edinburgh today to demonstrate our collective  demands for political actions to be taken to stop climate change I was heartened by the knowledge that tens of thousands of people across the rest of  Europe and the world where also taking action on the streets to influence our politicians. The colourful,  witty explicit placards and costumes spoke volumes and few formal speeches were needed.

our future in your hands   polar bears    protect our planet   reuse recycle

stop pollution

The messages on the placards also drew attention to issues of pollution and the need to take personal action to help our environment. This is exactly what about 50 people did yesterday  on Cramond beach as together we took part in the  2014 Beach Watch weekend organised by the Marine Conservation Society  (MCS) as part of the national and international monitoring of the state of our beaches.

Cramond survey bagging up

Cramond Beach has many important memories for me  as its the beach  I launched my first Crowd Funding appeal for my project and where  I was first instructed in the MCS’s  very detailed, internationally accepted method of beach litter surveying .  Yesterday I joined the ‘political action’ on the beach and teamed up with local residents Claire and Oliver who were also returnees to the surveying, together we made up one of the 10 teams that scrutinised a ten metre section of 100m of the beach carefully marked out.

Cramond survey sept 14 WS Cloth Pads
As we slowly zigzaged our way down the beach from the hightide line to the low water mark , we quickly fell into discussing the particular litter problem that this beach suffers from and that has been witnessed here on successive years of surveys  that is the vast amounts of sanitary cloths. The ‘cloths’  we find are some kind of mixed cotton and plastic fibres we think they could be some form of changing  or incontinence pads. At first they are almost  imperceptible as they are matted in with the sand and only a few fibres poke through the surface, but as usual you soon become adept at spotting the ‘cloths’. The pads were duly pulled out of the seaweed and sand and bagged up.  Our team collected 310 pieces of the pads/cloths in our 10m stretch of beach. The questions are echoed in each  survey team – where do they all come from ? Have they been dumped at sea? Are the coming down the sewage system? The MCS suggested that the reason for this amount of sanitary litter is that the cost of collection of this sort  waste by sanitary disposal companies is so much that homes/institutions  keep on flushing them down the toilets, reaching the beach  through the storm drains which don’t all have filters ?

cramond storrm drain 2 product labels

After the group tally of  107kg of litter collected in the survey area, I take one of my own strandline walks where I note down everything I see.  I decided to exclude the cloths from my list as I had seen enough in the sand and caught between the stones on the storm drain stream and I  concentrate just on litter that had product names :
Mars – Iron Bru – Castol Oil – Maltesers – Sinsbury’s – Kellogs – Strathmore Water – Pot Noodles – Coke a cola – Asda – Co-op –Milkyway – Tesco

So my overriding memory of Cramond  Beach on Beach Watch day was of Product Wrapers and sanitary pads! But by the end of the clean up action Cramond Beach was much cleaner  over 300kg of litter had been removed through the mornings  ACTIVISM !

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Littoral Office – conversion

I am parked up in my post office van which is transformed from litter collection & sorting space to my mobile project ‘Office’, were I sit whenever I can grab a several hours to write up my littoral notes taken during my residency on Isle Martin mapping the litter washed up .

litter sorting porject office
May 2014: collection & sorting                                     August 2014:  writing & planning

It’s a strange feeling to be writing about beaches on the  North West coast, while sat in my office surrounded by forests  hundreds of miles south and about as far from the sea as I can possibly be. My location , like most people, is determined by where I am contracted to work, for me that means designing and facilitating paid art projects and at the moment that’s in the borders and Midlothian. But my many notebooks and photographs always travel with me and I am determined to try and write an article that documents my findings so far and what is being done by thousands of individual people to improve the situation we find on our shorelines.

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As I reconnect with my statistics of litter found on Isle martin’s back beach I am transported back to the west coast, the feeling of awe at the beauty of the place, sadness and disgust at what I am now after a year tracking the litter on such beaches used to seeing. Browsing through hundreds of images capturing heaps of rope and plastic objects  my passion and desire to creatively show what’s to a greater or lesser extent on every beach around Scotland, the UK and across the globe  is quickly ignited and I begin to write…. If anyone has any contacts in papers /publications in Scotland or UK, that they think might be interested in the ‘Littoral Story’  please leave a message below.

mixed litter on Isle Martin Litter line summary flattened

My immediate intention is to return to Ullapool with a visual presentation of the ‘Littoral Story- the pictures so far’. The presentation will be shown at the Ullapool Museum to coincide with the  last few weeks of my  ‘Future Fossil Collection’ installation there.  I will show images documenting all the events that have taken place over the last year on the beaches around Ullapool and on Isle Martin and I will be shedding light on the back stories behind the ‘fossils’, tracking oranges, CSI teams on Ullapool beaches, and skiff teams towing hundreds of metres of litter across Loch Kinnaird on World Environment Day. Dates for the showing will be announced shortly.

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Seaweed: collecting & pressing

west coast seaweed prints  oak leaf sea on somerset paper

As the summer temperatures rise and we all head for the cool breezes of the sea and to enjoy paddling through rock pools I hope you are able to see a plethora of seaweed fronds floating and decoratively draping over the rocks .

Collecting and pressing seaweeds is a ‘littoral zone’ pass time of mine , a welcome diversion from recording and photographing plastic bottles, gun cartridges and rope. My love of seaweeds was fueled by attending a course at Edinburgh University last year, where I soon realised the vast number of varieties of seaweeds around our shores. The more you look the more shapes and colours you see attached to rocks shells, bridges and other seaweeds.

 

saw wrack on newspaper

The prints above where made from seaweed collected during my west coast work in June ,

I will shortly be posting them out as rewards for sponsors and putting more prints on line

for sale  at www.askewprints.com  

I started pressing seaweeds in order to take relief prints from them. Their branching forms, being similar to the botanical specimens that I was used to printing, but the procedures for pressing seaweed samples is much more complicated. The method I tend to favour in order to get a natural floating impression is through immersing the sample in a tray of fresh water and putting a piece of card underneath it then lifting the card & sample out letting the water drain away. The sample is then placed under cloths, paper, a board and even pressure. Getting a good print is often a very delicate process taking much practice for each variety, the original sample choice is very important.

A few days ago I came across ‘The Rules for laying out and preserving seaweeds’ (as in the 1800’s) in a book displayed alongside exquisite pressed samples of red seaweeds collected from along the east coast of Scotland. The seaweeds were pressed by artist Sara Dodd and displayed at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh as part of her wonderful Sea Flora exhibition in which she revisits the ‘Victorian tradition of collecting & preserving seaweeds’.

Rhodomela confervides  IMG_3153 Callophyllis laciniata IMG_3144

Sara’s samples are delicately dramatic many looking like purple/crimson ink drawings displayed simply on while paper or between Perspex. The exhibition runs for another few days until the 27th July only catch it if you can and visit her website www.tangandware.com which documents her work and observations on seaweeds particularly along the East Lothian shore lines. Enjoy.

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Recycling sea litter

Tracking  the recycling journeys of litter across the country and beyond has made me realise just what an infinitesimal amount of resources we are wasting by chucking our litter into the sea and into landfill. As most of our natural resources are finite the more we can collect, reclaim and reuse the less resources we have to mine and the e cleaner our  environment will be

[Resources we need ÷ resources we reclaim = resources we need to extract]
An obvious equation but one which often gets skewed towards extraction through lack of commitment, but there are many companies and communities that are out there shouting out loud and clear about how the environment needs us to pay heed to this simple Maths!

A few months ago Ecover, the Green cleaning product brand launched ‘Ocean Bottle washing-up liquid’ the world’s first washing-up liquid bottle made from reclaimed ocean plastic which is now on sale in UK. Ecover worked with a manufacturer Logoplaste to combine plastic trawled from the sea with a plastic made from sugarcane (which it calls Plant-astic) and recycled plastic. In the initial trial, 10% of the plastic in the new bottle will have been retrieved from the sea, they are hoping to increase this proportion significantly in time. The quality of plastic retrieved from the sea is highly variable so it meant it had to be blended with other recycled plastic material to make it robust enough for a household cleaning product.

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What a great way to highlight the sea litter issue to recycle it into an object that is all too often found on our beaches certainly along the majority of  standlines I have surveyed. Plastic bottles are one of the most common domestic items to be washed up.  We retrieved 106 plastic bottles from the beach on Isle Martin, unfortunately many more were left behind through lack of time.  Often the bottles are blown beyond the strandline, in exposed places sometimes hundreds of metres inland, vegetation grows over them and we re only aware of their presences when we walk over them and hear that plastic crackling plastic sound

TED ent bottle   IMG_2312
The Marine Conservation Society, states that plastic debris accounts for almost 60% of all litter found on UK beaches, with much of it ending up in the sea. Fish in the northern Pacific Ocean ingest as much as 24,000 tonnes of plastic each year – the equivalent of 480m two-litre plastic bottles. Around 46,000 pieces of plastic are swirling around every square mile of ocean.Fish in the northern Pacific Ocean ingest as much as 24,000 tonnes of plastic each year – the equivalent of 480m two-litre plastic bottles.
Philip Malmberg, chief executive of Ecover, said: “The scale of the ocean plastic problem is enormous – every year at least a million sea birds and 100,000 sharks, turtles, dolphins and whales die from eating plastic. There is no choice – we simply have to aim to clean up ocean plastic for good.”
Ecover has joined pioneering group of manufacturing companies  who are  using their products to raise environmental awareness to the vast amounts of waste we throw into the seas . In 2010 Electrolux  launched a Vac from the Sea” project in which they partnered up with volunteers (individuals, group and environmental organizations) to collect plastic from the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Baltic Sea. The items they collected were then transformed into five state-of-art vacuum cleaners, each one representing one of the seas or oceans from which the plastics originates.

images seas plastic from sea vacs 1
Image Courtesy: From Left to right—The North Sea Edition, The Indian Ocean Edition, The Mediterranean Sea Edition, The Pacific Ocean Edition, The Baltic Sea Edition, Green Range Ultra One. Electrolux Vac from the Sea
The Electrolux company states on it’s on the corporate website that : “The vacuum cleaners embody the plastic paradox: oceans are full of plastic waste, yet on land there is a shortage of recycled plastic for producing sustainable vacuum cleaners. Electrolux makes Green Range vacuum cleaners from 70% recycled plastic, but wants to reach 100%.”
This seems to me a great corporate response illustrating how the collection and reclaiming of our waste can help to re-balance ourskewed resources equation and at the same time as raising our environmental awareness to sea litter. The vacuum cleaners were auctioned to raise money for further research and ocean cleaning. I hope Electrolux’s research continues and like Ecover they are able to devise increasingly more effective equipment to fit on more trawlers with which they are able to retrieve greater amounts of plastic for cleaning and recycle.

 

N.B Ecover’s manufacturing partner in recycling the bottle waste  is a company called ‘Closed Loop’. The managing director of this company Chris Dow who last night appeared on radio 4’s Bottom Line explaining the recycling process  of plastic bottles at his high-tech recycling plant in Dagenham, east London where they process 5 million bottles a day!

 

 

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Statistics and Questions

Out of the 116kg of litter removed from the Back Beach on Isle Martin on the 5th of June, 106.5kg went to Caithness to be buried as landfill and 9.5 kg have entered the recycling system graded into the following categories:

drinks bottles Drinks bottles will be recycled into more bottles

milk bottles graph  Milk bottles will be recycled into more bottleswashing up bottls copy   Washing liquid bottles, will  be going for power incineration for electricity
aluminium cans Aluminium cans will be remade into new cans
Tin cans copy Tin cans will be added into general steel reprocessing

I am seeking permission to document all the above processes, from the multiple companies dealing with the materials and  my results will be posted.

Of the 25 strand-lines that I have recorded in Ross-shire and Sutherland over the last 12 months the highest percentage of litter is made up of commercial fishing related materials such as ropes, and cord. Given that it is going to take years before the volume of litter we find on the beaches is reduced, I am asking the obvious question :

Can more of this litter be recycled or at the very least be used for fuel in electricity plants?

I have thrown this question out to the waste industry specialists that I have met, but I am welcome any information and ideas that readers have regarding the processing of the mixed plastic waste that makes up so much of our litter and our refuse bins. Two particular items that we find masses of on the beach are plastic caps and polystyrene surely they can be recycled

 caps-     polystyrene

Having now seen the variety of plastics that gets sorted and categorised for processing at one transfer station which includes a vast array of plastic bags from the thin supermarket carrier bags to pet food sacks and bubble wrap I wonder why we are often not encouraged to include these in the recycling bins.

stretching plastic quality copy     coloured plastic

Querying the value of plastic bags at Munros Transfer station Billy Munro explained to me the value of the various different grades of plastics by stretching the plastic between his fingers if it stretches well and is un coloured, thankfully like the bag I brought my litter evidence in from Isle Martin, then it is of high value and will be worth recycling . If on the other hand bags are coloured and have little stretch they will go for incineration. Let’s hope we see fewer bags and when we do that they are un-coloured.

 

 

 

 

 

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Recycling – hope

It’s ‘National Recycling Week’ & I am filled with hope as I witness the masses of materials that are beginning their recycling  journey

materials for recycling copy

Of the many different materials that I collected on the Isle Martin beach gun cartridges, bottle caps, rope, buoys, crates, etc only the plastic bottles and metal cans fitted the Highland Councils Recycling list. So it was these materials that I followed south to two waste transfer stations both located off the A9 just north of Inverness.

MUnros shed

My first hot stop on Tuesday morning was at Munros a massive busy aircraft hanger  on the edge of an industrial estate appropriately sited next to a neighbouring car crushing plant. As I waited in the shade of the site reception office for Billy Munro the owner of the company, who kindly agreed to meet and show me around I took in the site regulations and site check lists on the table noting that today the days temperature a sweltering 70 degrees, the fact that no wind /breeze was recorded and apparently there was no odour issue.  I see these checks are required of the site at regular intervals throughout the day .
Billy Munro is a wonderfully open about his waste transfer business which he set up in 2007 as an addition to his demolition business. I quickly began to understand how the prime purpose of the recycling transfer business especially in the Highlands (and other low population density areas) is about receiving small loads from multiple destinations, combing like materials, loading them up into much bigger trucks for transferring  on either to landfill or the companies actually carrying out the recycling process.
loading mixed mats munros copy mixed paper

Walking into the hanger we were first confronted a multi-coloured paper mountain, the texture of the mountain face being made up of every conceivable type of paper you can imagine. This paper is heaped up sorted again into mixed or top quality paper piles ready for bailing and shipping out. The plastics and metals are sorted by 10 men along a conveyor belt, onto which mixed materials are automatically fed. The noise of the machinery and plant loading the hoppers is loud and the smell of the items on the belt is strong. The men move fast sorting out three different types of plastic bottles, while the metals are sorted by magnets and shot into different bins at the end of the line. The whole process takes place on a structure above the shed floor to enable the materials to drop down into different compartments.

loading conveyerbelt the cnveyer belt op me & conveyer beltseperation of aper quality
Having carried my evidence bags of beach litter from Ullapool, I joined the line momentarily to add my plastic and metal to the line thankful that these few bottles and cans will be sorted and will go to be recycled to reduce the amount of oil and metal ore needing to be mined. . My hope is that the rest of the bottles from the litter lines and metal cans will also be somewhere in these mounds. By the end of the day the  milk bottles collected on the beach  should end up somewhere in a growing mound  and the washing up bottles will be bailed up ready to sending for processing by the end of the week.

milk bottles washing up bottls copy

The transfer times of materials to the next stage of their recycling process is governed to a large extent by the market prices of materials , for example the price of drinks bottles (PET plastics) usually high apparently has dropped considerably due to an increase in Americas recovery of these items. So water and coke bottles will wait for the prices to rise, but unusually the milk bottles we towed off the island are presently fetching £400 tonne, more than drinks bottles worth £200. Billy began to explain the pricing fluctuations  as we watched the bailing process top quality paper (corrugated card) which will  be sold either to reprocessing mills in the UK in Rochdale and/or companies who ship it out for milling to India and China according to who offers the best price.

Munros cans being bailed B Munro copy bailing Hi Quality paper bailed mixed paper copy

The importance of the market price of materials in determining the next leg of the recycling journey was  a point that was re made to me later at Invergordon the Highland Councils own transfer station. Of all the materials coming into the stations Aluminium is probably the most profitable material per tonne,presently £700 tonne, but often much more. But as its light weight,  it requires thousands of  cans to make up a tonne. As my materials were sorted at the Ullapool depot the cans would be processed here like at Munros the metal is sorted using magnets but here the compacting and bailing is on a much smaller scale

conveyer belt of materials invergordon belt compacting cans making up bails

The Invergordon Waste Transfer Station deals with tins and paper arriving from the roadside and centre recycling points from Ross & Cromarty. Here Dave the councils man on the ground sorts, loads, processes materials to make up economically viable loads to fill hauliers 44 tonne trucks heading to processing plants across Scotland, the UK and onwards Europe, Asia……

metal bails
I am heartened to see the volume of materials being recovered, hopeful for us to improve the recovery of more materials and pleased to have been able to visit the teams of people working on the ground over the last week. They have helped me to begin to understand the recycling journey of materials we save. I will continue sharing the information I  have collected over the coming weeks and ideas that are arising following the ‘Litter Lines’

A great way to celebrate National Recycling Week! Recycling Week has been held since 2004 and its mission has been to simply encourage us to recycle more. http://www.recycleforscotland.com/

 

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Antidote – clean beaches

After visiting the Caithness landfill site, I took time to travel back to Ullapool along the dramatic coastal road. How wonderful to see so many clean beaches. Ito check this out but think this may be as a result of the tidal currents along  this North West stretch of the coast  which keeps the  litter off shore, plus the litter that does reach the shoreline is washed out easily across the sandy beaches and not caught in rocks and stones . The result is often the tourist industries announcement of  a converted  ‘Clean Beach Award’.

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IMG_2853 award winning beach sign IMG_2843
My litter notes on beaches in the bays of Farr, Sango and Balnakeil were so short, only 10 pieces over 500m an on some stretches had absolutely nothing! I rejoiced and ceased making notes on litter in favour of  photographing, collecting and sketching seaweed.

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This reminded me that it was my ‘wanting to see’ the seaweed, stones, sand and all the marine life that occupies the Littoral Zone  without having to search for it through the beach litter that started me off on this  journey. I look forward  to making relief prints from the seaweed samples collected over the last few days, which I will be sending to crowd funding supporters of the project. I will be making further prints of my north west coast seaweed collection so please e mail me  at littoralrtproject@btinternet.com if you would like to support the project through purchasing a print.

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Tonight I am sad to be leaving Ullapool and my friends here, but glad that this time I am heading east to follow the recycling journey of my ‘litter lines’ s. But  I will be back to show the progress of my investigation findings in the autumn. Thanks to everyone in Ullapool for their support!

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Landfill – waste

At least once in our lives we should all stand in the middle of a ‘landfill site’ and take time to reflect.

landfill mound
The westerly winds were with me as I left Ullapool with my evidence bag full of materials from the Back Beach and headed east along the A839 and then North through the contrasting low landscape of Caithness to the Seater Landfill Site, where all ‘non-recyclable materials’ are destined to go in the Highlands.

A839 caithnes road landfill sign repoting to site
The sign on the road gives nothing away as to the extensive waste handling operation that is going on up the single track road. I reported to Andrea The Highland Councils Waste Management Assistant at the site office, who summarised how large ‘cells’ of areas of the site are successively excavated across the site, filled with waste and then covered over.

seater landfill KW1 4TP
As we set off for the ‘tip face’ the haulage contractor from Ross-shire which would have included the beach litter from Isle Martin pulled out of the site having just dropped his consignment of 44 tonnes of waste into this months ‘cell’.

tip face wide  Tip face web

We followed the track up to the centre of the site entered the netted area protecting the exposed waste from the winds and birds . Pausing to try and take in the waste we were about to walk over, I was pleased the day was overcast to dampen the smell and glare from shining colours of the plastic bags and objects mounded in front of us.  The volume of litter before us was chilling – bags and bags of our rubbish, bottles, food, books, household objects and now ….

evidence bag web

 

walking away from the evidence web
I took my ‘evidence bag’ to the centre of the cell placing it down, sickened to be adding yet more rubbish to this burial mound. Walking across this squelching mound of rubbish I felt the heavy weight of the litter beneath me . Is there an alternative? Can we reduce what we use, throw away and therefore have to bury? Each day at this site the council deals with 3-5 trucks of rubbish, requiring excavation, lining the cells to prevent leaching , the water run-off has to be drained and filtered before it can join the natural water courses and the mounds have to be capped off with the earth removed earlier. The site is anticipated to be in use burying our rubbish until 2040. The illustrated Guide to Britain lying on top of the mound seems to be testimony to what we are doing and therefore the reason for this site .

illustrated guide to Britain web

Andrea pointed out that significant amounts of the rubbish before us could have been recycled if it had been separated. We all need to try harder to be separating out materials so this mound is kept to a minimum. She also is working locally to increase awareness as to the need to do this. The children’s painting on the side of the site office is simple, strong and heart warming ‘Recycle’

recycling mural
I drove away chanting the  Waste Service moto ‘REDUCE, REUSE , RECYLE, REDUCE,  REUSE , RECYCLE, REDUCE, REFUSE, RECYCLE which quickly changed into REFUSE, REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE the battle cry against excessive plastic packaging.

Many thanks to the Highland Councils, Waste Services for allowing me to follow the outcomes of the litter I have towed off Isle Martin.

 

 

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Lines arriving

On the mainland the hauled up lines  and containers full of litter from the beach have been collected from the Isle Martin Slipway by the Highland Counci and taken back to Ullapools Waste Transfer Station. I  spent Monday mirroring  the sorting procedure of the station selecting out materials for recycling and landfill . In total 116 kilos of litter  was removed from the back beach and  towed off the island, unfortunately there is much more still there!

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The majority of the litter  was rope and commercial fishing litter, with a small amount of domestic litter the majority of which was undoubtedly plastic bottles and caps . From my collection the plastic bottles and metal cans are the prime the materials that will feed into the recycling program of the Highland Council the rest will unfortunately be going to landfill .   I will shortly be heading off north to follow the  journey that waste materials going to landfill make from Ross-Shire once compacted into the road containers.

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As I worked through the litter inside the  open shed of the Transfer Station  high on the hill  Isle Martin was in view and  I mused on  how in less than 24hours I had moved from the  sublime to the ridiculous. I will definitely return to the small fascinating sublime island to revel in its ecology and views.

 

 

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Departing Lines

I towed the last litter lines off the island on Sunday. The corrugated plastic sections of prawn boxes float well, but as I pulled away from the pontoon the slits in the box sections caught on to one another  creating an underwater knot which kept wrapping around as I doubled back to the the pontoon. Pausing to to unravel the knot  I realised the  rubber gloves tied on the end  section had unbalanced the line causing it to twist. Pulling the rubber glove and gun cartridge lines into the boat I set off again this time a  broad  white  line was drawn across the surface of the  loch leading from the boat to the island .  A  strong symbolic  mark denoting the three weeks work mapping collecting and removing removing the washed up litter on an a small uninhabited island.

departiing line

The litter lines drawn across the loch have been recorded and will form the starting point for a  series of future visual statements  about the nature and volume of  beach litter along our coast. I intend to bring the development is work back to Ullapool in the autumn, to celebrate the work of the Littoral Art Project’s work here  with all those who have taken part over the past year.

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