Protecting our playground - one wooden belly board at a time….
When did bodyboards become disposable?
Keep Britain Tidy (KBT) Beach care team have been running their #waveofwaste project in North Devon and Cornwall to collect discarded body boards for the last few years and the results have been staggering - Over 500 broken boards were collected from Croyde in 2019 and without the efforts of Neil Hembrow from KBT to find a way to recycle them, all of these would have ended up in landfill or an incinerator! It is estimated that if two broken boards were discarded each day of the summer holiday on every Devon & Cornish bathing water beach then over 14,586 boards would head to landfill.
Cheap stuff is costing us the Earth?
Hey, it’s only a bit of fun, it’s only a few quid and it’s only a bit of plastic, what’s the problem? At first glance a few hundred, even a few thousand, boards don’t seem that much but when you think about how they got here, what they are made of and what happens to them, it’s something that we should be very concerned about.
Your average cheap polystyrene body-board is manufactured in China, shipped over 5000 miles, distributed to stores and surfed for 10 minutes before breaking and going to landfill. About 99% of all plastic comes from fossil fuels, these are then refined and manufactured into plastic, transported, used by consumers and disposed of into some form of waste management system or the natural environment. The impact is massive and long lasting. Every stage of this process releases toxic chemicals into the environment that wildlife and humans ingest and inhale. This stuff lasts for hundreds of years in nature and 40% of it is deliberately designed to be disposable after a few minutes, hours, days use. The only other substance that humans have come up with that is this toxic and enduring is radioactive waste.
It gets worse. In 2019, the production and incineration of plastic produced the greenhouse gas emissions from 189 five-hundred megawatt coal power plants. The petrochemical industry is investing billions of dollars to increase production and this figure will rise to 295 coal power plants equivalent by 2030 and 615 by 2050! What on earth are we thinking?
Look after Mother nature as if our lives depend on it
Unless you have just woken up from a 50 year deep sleep it’s hard not to realise that we are currently in a health, climate and nature emergency. They are all linked and have been caused by the way that humans have been treating this planet and the life on it. From an entirely selfish perspective, this is our life support system and we are wrecking it and dragging a load of amazing forms of life down with us. We really need to be looking after nature as if our lives depended on it - because they do.
Long term thinking - a healthy planet fit for our grandchildren
So let’s do things differently. The idea to provide an opportunity for locals and visitors to hire wooden belly boards as part of Plastic Free North Devon’s ‘Protect our Playground’ project was a response to last year’s KBT project. Wooden belly boards are made of a sustainable material and last for ages - no brainer!
The team at Saunton Surf Hire thought the same. They agreed to run a pilot hire scheme with any profit supporting two local charities - Plastic Free North Devon (PFND) and Surf Mobility. A generous grant from Turnstyle Designs allowed PFND to develop the project and meet its share of the up-front costs and the boards are now ready to use. Hopefully this model will spread and become best practice, helping to keep toxic plastic out of our environment.
Talking to people about this project has produced loads of comments like ‘We’ve still got my grandmother’s board’ or ‘I’ve still got mine from when I was a kid’. It’s fantastic to think that something that our grandparent’s generation enjoyed can still be enjoyed by their grandchildren. Who would have thought that wooden belly boards could become a metaphor for how we should be treating our planet?
It’s a reminder that our choices now have a long term impact (for good or bad) which will affect future generations. And it’s up to us which choices we make and these are more likely to be the right ones if we remember that we are customers in a caring community rather than seeing ourselves in the eyes of a big corporation that views us as individual consumers and the source of this year’s profit.
Think global - Act local
OK, so it’s just one shop, one beach and 20 belly boards (plus all those ones out there in Grandad's shed). It won’t save the planet by itself but it’s the best we can do right now where we are and it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Doing nothing is simply not an option anymore.
What can people do? We would love residents and visitors to North Devon to:
Come and have a go and ‘try the ply.’
Encourage other hire shops to get involved and offer a similar service.
Ask local retailers to stop selling cheap, plastic beach toys and surf gear.
Recycle any broken polystyrene body-boards are one of the KBT collection points
Think long term. Try to buy quality items that will last and avoid the temptation of cheap, poorly made things that will end up in the waste system after a week or two of use.
So please, do the best that you can wherever you are and whatever your circumstances. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it all makes a difference, particularly when we work together as a local and global community. Who can ask any more than that?
To find out more about the impact of Plastic on Climate Change and Human Health have a look at the summaries of two reports produced by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) by following these links:
https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-Climate-Executive-Summary-2019.pdf