Borrowing Equipment Information Form

This form has been produced to help get the most information and data about the litter you collect on your beach clean ups.

Data has been a very important part of fighting marine litter and helping to introduce legislation to reduce the litter we find in and around our coastal communities. Data collection through the Marine Conservation Society helped lobby for the 5p tax on plastic bags. Data collection has been one of the driving factors for the Beaches and Marine Litter Project that GRAB has run for over 10 years, but more detailed data is required.

We are now working in partnership with a company called Terracycle, who are able to offer us the ability to collect ‘beach plastics’ that quite often cannot be put into the Local Authority recycling due to contamination i.e. sand/seaweed. They are classed as rigid plastics and include the following

If are using our equipment, you will be given litter pickers, gloves, black bags, clear bags and a couple of spring balances. We would like you to separate the rigid plastics you find on the beach into the clear bags and all other rubbish into the black sacks.

The easiest way to do this is to organise your volunteers into groups – one group using clear bags and the other using black bags. The volunteers with the clear bags will only collect the rigid plastics as illustrated in the picture.

Please then weigh the rubbish using the spring balance provided and send this information, along with number of bags, clear and black, number of volunteers, how long the clean-up took and the length of the area you cleaned. This can then be recorded on this form (see table below) and then sent through to your local area project worker.

The rigid plastics found on the beach CANNOT be recycled if they have any oil on them, so please throw these into the black sacks if they are contaminated with any hydrocarbon including tar.

Polystyrene cannot be recycled so do not put this in the clear sacks.

Information required:

Number of black bags and weight / Number of clear bags and weight / Number of volunteers / Length of area cleaned / How long the clean-up took

All clean ups are greatly appreciated and the more often an area is cleaned the more data becomes available and the cleaner that area becomes.

Although we only offer litter grants to organisations once a year, we would like to encourage you to organise another clean up later on in the year in the same area. Marine Conservation encourage clean ups in April/May and September at the Big Beach cleans and this data is then used to help build up a picture of the condition of our Marine environment.

Details can be returned to any of the below contacts:

Project Workers:

Terry Donovan (Oban Lorn and the Isles) – – 01631 567919

Ben Appleby (Dunoon/Helensburgh) – – 01369 708515

Andrea McShannon (Mid-Argyll and Kintyre) –

01586 555297

Manager: Graham Love - – 01546 604420

Administrator: Jean Kennedy – – 01546 604227