Moves have been made to ensure that Tenby’s South Beach is kept as litter free as possible, with another busy holiday season upon the seaside town.
Discarded bottles and cans were found on an ‘alarming’ 99% of Welsh beaches during 2024, while plastic litter across UK beaches increased by almost 10%, an annual survey has found, with calls for a deposit return scheme to be introduced swiftly to tackle the problem.
County councillor for the town’s south ward Cllr Sam Skyrme-Blackhall said that she’d had a meeting this month with the Local Authority over issues specifically relating to litter on South Beach, sharing on May 6: “Yesterday I had a meeting with members of Pembrokeshire County Council refuse team and the management of Kiln Park due to vast amounts of rubbish left in this area over the past few weeks.
“I was really pleased that Kiln Park are keen to work with our excellent PCC teams in managing the waste. We are also trialling having four additional drum bins on South beach by the entrance to Kiln Park.
“Haven Holidays are also going to provide signage to encourage people to use the bins at Kiln Park if the drum bins are full.
“Please leave just footprints on the sand,” she added.
Volunteers from the ‘Time for Tenby’ group will also be continuing beach and town litter picks throughout the season.
The Marine Conservation Society, the UK’s leading ocean membership charity, in its annual report - ‘State of our Beaches 2024’ - has called for urgent action to be taken to reduce beach pollution following what it called ‘alarming’ new data collected by their beach clean volunteers as part of the Beachwatch programme.
The report shows that ‘drinks-related litter’ was found on 99% of Welsh beaches, with glass bottles present on almost half (49%) of Welsh beaches surveyed.
The charity is calling on the Welsh Government to promptly introduce a planned Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) that includes glass in a bid to lessen the problem.
The proposed DRS will see consumers pay a small deposit on top of the price of a drink, which you get back when you return the empty container to a designated collection point.
UK-wide, the charity found that plastic litter increased by 9.5% from the previous year.
In Wales, 119 surveys were recorded in 2024, an increase of 8% from the previous year.
A total of 1,073 volunteers participated in the charity’s beach clean programme, gathering and recording all litter items found along 100-metre stretches of beach.
Volunteers in Wales found an average of 120 litter items for every 100 metres of surveyed beaches - up four per cent from the previous year, suggesting that despite ongoing efforts, the issue of beach pollution still persists.
The report said that, in Wales, volunteer surveys revealed an average of 10 drinks-related litter items, such as cans, plastic and glass bottles, were found per 100-metre stretch of beach with drinks-related litter present on 99% of beaches surveyed.