Earth Day 2021 - Cleaning Plastic from a Beach on the Isle of Dogs

Isle of Dogs at low tide looking towards Canary Wharf and Limehouse

The theme for Earth Day 2021 was ‘Restore Our Earth’ so yesterday I did something I do from time to time (but not nearly often enough). I cleaned up the plastic waste from one of the Isle of Dogs beaches. In this case it was the beach below the Sir John McDougall Gardens, off Westferry Road.

When I left my full time job, even before I became a photographer, I went on a riverside clean up with Thames 21 at Hammersmith. That really opened my eyes to the huge amount of rubbish getting dumped into the Thames, most of it completely unknown to the person who used the item in the first place. From that experience I wanted to do more so I joined the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) and booked to go on a beach clean in Kent. That was another huge eye opener but of a different sort. Over a hundred people turned up for that event and yet there were very little plastics to pick up and the beach was relatively clean.

The two experiences made me see that I didn’t need to travel miles (using petrol and running a car) to be able to contribute in a meaningful way. The problem, as is often the case, was on my own doorstep. So, one day, I set out to find a tidal beach nearby that I could walk to and started to collect all the plastics I could find. Boom! Right there I found a way to get plastics out of the river and save them from flowing into the seas and oceans.

What I’ve discovered as well are the other benefits. People will shout out thank yous when they see what you’re doing. They’ll stop to chat. You can hear people talking to their kids about the effects of rubbish on the environment. One person yesterday told us about a local polluting company (they’ve seen them dumping rags and other waste directly into the river). And three people yesterday, totally unprompted, started to help and left a phone number, saying they want to join in the next session. This really is a case of “Be the change the want to see in the world”, where what you do has a ripple effect.

I’ve also met two new friends locally through doing this. Which leads me on to even more benefits. It focuses our conversation on other areas of our lives where we can make a difference, such as eating less meat and cutting out food waste. Yesterday, my beach clean buddy was @marinebiologymarta who does a huge amount of clean up work locally on the Thames and in the canals. You can see her Instagram feed by clicking on her Insta name above and follow her to see her posts which raise awareness.

They’re the benefits but there are some things to be careful of. The steps down can be slippery and broken. They’re washed by the tide twice a day after all! You have to be very careful of the tides. I’ve seen people having to run knee deep after being caught out! I have a tide app on my phone and I make sure to go at the safest time. The water of the Thames is dirty and you can catch Weil’s disease. It’s pretty nasty so I won’t go into it here. You just have to wear gloves, keep your hands as clean as possible and wash them very thoroughly as soon as you can afterwards.

The fight to ‘Restore our Earth’ has to be fought on many levels and one thing the lockdown gave was time to work out more small steps I can take to help. So, having found out that waste food has a huge adverse effect on the environment, we now plan our meals for the week so that there’s very little, if any, waste. We also plan for only 5 meals per week using fish or meat, the rest are vegetarian. None of us has to change the world ourselves. I believe we’re all part of the global network taking the steps we can individually to fix this.

Below are photos of what we collected. That’s two good bags of plastic which can’t find it’s way into the sea anymore. It can no longer be a litter eyesore on the Thames and it can’t break down into micro plastics to be ingested by sealife and ultimately people.

Plastic rubbish collected from one small stretch of beach

And finally, here’s me in action. Despite it only being April, I managed to get sunburned. That’s Scottish skin for you!

I hope you enjoyed Earth Day! I’m looking forward to seeing if I can make some more small changes over the coming year. And I’m enjoying being a small cog in the global machine that’s working to make the Earth more beautiful and clean!

Yours, Loren