It has prompted the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), which carried out the Beachwatch study, to urge the public to support the organisation’s ‘bag it and bin it – don’t flush it’ campaign and to stop using toilets as a watery dustbin.
New figures for last year showed that in the South East region a total of 90,906 items of litter, an average of 1,564 per beach, including bathroom waste, plastic and fishing rubbish, were collected from 101 beaches – an eight per cent rise since 2009.
Nineteen of Kent’s beaches were included in the MCS study, although the organisation said it would not name and shame any specific sites.
Items found included cotton buds, condoms, sanitary towels and tampon applicators.
MCS Beachwatch officer Lauren Davis said the figures revealed a shocking picture of what people do in the privacy of their own bathroom.
"Increasingly people seem to be putting things down their loos that belong in the bin," she said.
"Cotton buds, condoms, tampons, tampon applicators and sanitary towels are being flushed away with an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ perception. But sewerage networks are not specifically designed to remove these sort of items and unfortunately more and more are ending up in our rivers and then on our beaches." read on here
Deal Beach Clean is on the 8th May....
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