Do you love walks along your local beach? Love my beach are calling on all regular beach users to help identify and report signs of coastal pollution. 

Coastal pollution has the potential to harm our beaches, seas and wildlife. Various sources of pollution can impact bathing water quality and the reputation of beaches, whilst being unpleasant to look at and potentially dangerous for beach users.

Emily Parr, Fylde Beach Care Officer says, “Major pollution incidents are well reported, enabling swift action to prevent further damage. In comparison, minor pollution incidents often go unreported and have the potential to cause ongoing and significant environmental damage.”

Regular beach visitors are likely to be the first people to spot these smaller incidents, maybe just by noticing a change to the usual appearance of an area or unusual occurrences.

So LOVEmyBEACH are asking members of the public to act as the eyes and ears on the ground and report any potential pollution incidents. Once the relevant authorities are aware, they will be able to investigate and take action. Hopefully preventing further damage.

To help identify coastal pollution and know how and where to report it, LOVEmyBEACH have put together a handy leaflet.

This is available for anyone to download from the LOVEmyBEACH website – https://lovemybeach.org/resources/

The most common signs of pollution that might be noticed are:

• Signs of sewage (e.g. sewage solids, pipes discharging dirty water, sewage fungus growing or grey clouds around a pipe).
• A significantly large rainbow coloured film or thick sludge, indicating oil
• Abnormally high levels of litter or dumped waste. Or large quantities of one particular material e.g. a deluge of microplastics
• The presence of a new substance or material on the beach, e.g. palm oil

Together we can keep our beaches and seas clean and free of pollution!

For more information, please contact enquiries@lovemybeach.org