Every year volunteers in Orkney walk the beaches of the islands to pick up waste which has landed on the shores by one means or another. Much of this waste comes from elsewhere and is washed or blown ashore, unsightly and dangerous to wildlife.

 Between June 2019 and the end of July 2023 volunteers in the Seychelles  picked up nine tonnes of marine litter from their beaches. More than 1,220 volunteers were recruited to clear 52 beaches across ten islands.

930,000m² of beaches were surveyed with volunteers picking up items ranging from foam and rubber to metals and plastics.

Through their commitment to clean up their beaches, the islanders picked up: 6,135kg of non-plastic debris and 2,835kg of plastic, such as food packaging, plastic bottles and more weathered items that had originated offshore.

The Seychelles is a very popular tourist destination and on some of the beaches surveyed, the litter had been deposited from local sources, but on other beaches up to 75% of the items were found to have been transported from elsewhere.

All the findings of the initiative have been published in a study led by the University of Plymouth and the environmental organisation, Parley for the Oceans. It is published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

Alvania Lawen, a BSc Environmental Management and Sustainability student at the University and Seychelles country manager for Parley for the Oceans, is the study’s lead author.

She explained: 

“This study, and the years of work that led to it, highlight the potential of citizen science and the positive impacts it can have.

“As an islander myself, I know how people living in the Seychelles rely on the ocean for every part of their lives. But because we are a collection of remote islands, there are challenges in managing waste and we also have to deal with large quantities of items coming from elsewhere.

“Initiatives such as the beach clean-ups give people the opportunity to be part of the solution, and to tell their own stories about how they are being impacted by environmental issues.”

The Seychelles, at the heart of the Indian Ocean, consists of more than 115 islands with a combined population of about 100,000 people, numbers swelled each year by a considerable influx of tourists to the region.

Waste material is also transported onto the islands’ beaches by ocean currents and is then trapped by vegetation, which is where much of the waste highlighted in the current study was found.

This research is the latest by the University of Plymouth to examine the global threat posed by plastic pollution, but also some of the solutions being developed to address it.

In 2019, it was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize in recognition of its pioneering research on microplastics pollution in the ocean and its impact on the environment and changing behaviour.

Dr Andrew Turner, Associate Professor in Environmental Sciences and the study’s corresponding author, added: 

“As is often the case with environmental pollution, this is a clear example of waste generated in one place having significant impacts elsewhere. The quantity of litter collected during the beach cleans is astounding, and a testament to the efforts of citizen scientists living and working in the Seychelles.

“However with climate change anticipated to increase the quantity and severity of storm surges, and plastic and other waste being generated in increasing quantities, items will continue to wash up on the beaches unless other, highly populated and industrialised Indian Ocean nations engage in more sustainable waste management.”

Click on this link to access the study ‘Beached plastic and other anthropogenic debris in the inner Seychelles islands: Results of a citizen science approach’, published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.