Our wild and far-flung places don’t come much wilder or more far-flung than Sandwood Bay, a mile-long sweep of sand just a few miles south of Cape Wrath in northwest Sutherland.
250 miles from the Central Belt, four miles from the nearest road, flanked by high cliffs and surrounded by upland blanket bog, Sandwood is the epitome of wild, the embodiment of remote. This isn’t somewhere that you happen upon, this is somewhere you plan to visit. And last week, like so many others who seek out wild places in order to feel revitalised and connected to something more fundamental and essential, I did just that.
Pristine Sandwood Bay in September 2003.
I’d visited once before, way back in 2003 when I camped overnight high above the dunes, long after the daytrippers had gone home. The next day I walked the lonely cliffs to Cape Wrath and back and never saw a soul. The experience left a long-lasting impression and afterwards I’d wax lyrical about Sandwood Bay to anyone who’d listen, telling of a huge pristine beach where Atlantic breakers rolled like curls of butter onto the sand, where ghosts patrolled the dunes and gannets plunged into the surf.
I’d built it up so much that I already knew my second visit couldn’t possibly have the same emotional impact, but I was confident that Sandwood Bay would still impress. And true enough, as I crested those final dunes and the roar from the sea washed over me, I felt my heart beat faster.
What a view! The azure waves breaking, the seaspray moving past the cliffs like clouds, the ocean-borne rubbish in th…….
Oh, hang on, there’s something in the foreground. Something blue on the beach. Erm…sorry, where was I? Ah yes. The azure waves breaking, the seaspray moving past the cliffs like clouds, the ocean-borne rubb….
Damn it!
Looking down the beach and out to Cape Wrath the view should have been immense. But it wasn’t. I’d emerged from the dunes within ten metres of a large blue fishing crate and, try as I might I just couldn’t see past it. Admittedly, one crate hardly represents a visual or ecological assault on somewhere as vast as Sandwood Bay, but it none the less jarred with how I remembered the place.
I walked past the crate to get an interrupted view north to the Cape, but I had eyes in the back of my head. The crate was insistent. As I walked farther along the beach my gaze was fixed firmly at my feet, because what did I now see as I trudged the sand? Plastic. Lots and lots of plastic.
Drawing the eye and hard to ignore.
Yoghurt pots, gloves, nylon rope, crab pots, sweet wrappers, bottle tops, and numerous smaller items that were unidentifiable – the ‘microplastics’, tiny pieces just millimetres across and of all different colours, like confetti. A rainbow of shame scattered across this wildest of places.
I should however point out that when I say ‘lots and lots of plastic’ there was by no means so much of it that I couldn’t help kicking rubbish aside with my feet. It’s not like that at all. It’s not piled high or blowing in the wind. Neither is it covering the beach from end to end. I was actively looking for it, plus it was the tail end of winter when fierce storms have brought the worst of it ashore. I’d even go so far as to say that the casual visitor probably wouldn’t even notice any litter. And even if they did they’d think little of it because they’d regard Sandwood Bay as among the cleanest beaches they’ve seen….because it is! So it’s certainly no less worthy a destination on account of litter because, in truth, you will find the same (and arguably worse) problem on every beach you visit.
None the less, it didn’t matter how much I roamed the beach in search of that pristine wilderness experience I’d felt 13 years earlier, it just wasn’t there. There was plastic at the loch, by the river, in the dunes and on the beach, and now that I had my eye in for it…..it was all I could see.
Dismayed, I stopped at a length of blue plastic tubing. I picked it up and used it to draw a small square where I stood, each edge about 2.5m in length. I then gathered all the litter I could find in that one tiny square of sand, and piled it together. It was quite a haul, and it was sobering to imagine how many squares this size filled the beach.
As a ranger, the bulk of my working week can sometimes involve picking up litter. From laybys, parks, hedges, rivers, playgrounds, trees and ponds. Bags and bags of it. And for that reason I think I need to know that untainted places do exist, that there are still some corners of our coastline that are beyond the reach of the flotsam, jetsam, and filthy detritus that humanity has carelessly or thoughtlessly disposed of.
It’s a naïve hope I admit, even for our wildest places. Only last year I photographed plastic pollution on the beaches of both Mull and Islay, so I knew it existed in our more remote places too. I knew it was everywhere. But seeing it here, in somewhere particularly far flung, in a place I treasured and where I’d had a singularly uplifting experience…..it brought home to me the extent of this global problem in a way I’d not experienced before.
Where does it come from?
Hardly any of the plastic at Sandwood is brought in by visitors. Globally, about 20% of plastic in the oceans comes from shipping but that masks regional differences. In the North Sea it accounts for 40% of the total, but worldwide around 80% of marine plastic comes from land sources.
Some countries have little or no waste management/disposal and even in countries that do, a lot of it escapes the net or is irresponsibly discarded, and lost into the environment. The world over, plastic is washed or blown into watercourses, all of which eventually discharges into the sea.
Left: Coming to a beach near you! Plastic bottles & styrofoam from the River Avon in West Lothian. Right: Plastic rubbish at Uisken, Isle of Mull
Microplastics smaller than 5mm are the most numerous fragments, many of which are invisible to the naked eye. Some are manufactured at that size such as the tiny beads that are added to cosmetics and toothpastes to aid in scrubbing action. But most others begin their lives as something larger. As the sun, the salt and the ocean turbulence work away at the plastic, it breaks down into ever smaller pieces. But because plastic takes hundreds of years to biodegrade, it accumulates.
Plastic planet
Standing at Sandwood Bay or indeed on any beach you care to mention, the scale of the problem is impossible to grasp because, aside from the occasional unsightly dashes of colour strewn on the beach, the problem is hidden from view. But make no mistake, it’s nothing short of a global environmental catastrophe.
This year the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimated that 8 million tonnes of plastic is dumped into the oceans every year, the equivalent of one full bin lorry emptying its load into the sea every minute of every day. By 2025 it’s believed there will be 250 million tonnes of plastic in the oceans. Worse still, a recent report presented at the World Economic Forum estimated that by 2050 there would be, in terms of weight, more plastic in the oceans than fish.
Because of ocean currents, litter doesn’t remain where it is, it moves about and disperses widely. It has been found frozen in polar sea ice and in sediment at the bottom of the deepest marine trenches, at depths of 3000m. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, whether it’s Tongue, Troon, Tahiti or Tierra del Fuego…..plastic pollution is now ubiquitous.
So what?
Other than the obvious aesthetic impact of having rubbish blighting our beaches, it’s our wildlife that suffers most. Sea creatures, birds and land-lubbing animals can all get tangled up or garrotted by discarded lines and nets but, more insidiously, the unseen microplastics are being ingested by both the smallest and the largest marine creatures, from worms to whales. Some do so passively, others because they actively mistake it for food.
A shocking study of an albatross colony on the Pacific atoll of Midway found dead chicks’ stomachs full of plastic, which had been regurgitated as food by their parents. It’s believed the chicks are starving to death, their stomachs telling them they’re full when they’re not.
Plastic is an industrial pollutant as it can contain harmful hydrocarbons, antimicrobials, flame retardants or additives. Other toxins joining the party in marine stomachs can include lead, cadmium, mercury and bisphenol A – the latter a toxin present in plastic bottles, which has been shown to disrupt hormones and cause damage to the reproductive systems of animals. To make matters worse, plastic particles act as magnets to other sea-borne chemicals already out there in the oceans.
I’m not sure I need to spell it out, but we sit at the top of the food chain. It doesn’t matter how sustainable your fish is, how ethically it was caught, at the end of day what the sea creatures eat, we eat. And so you have to wonder what on earth we are doing to ourselves in the long run, poisoning and then consuming increasingly plastic sea creatures.
Microplastics and other fragments washed ashore at Sandwood Bay.
We absorb toxins in our everyday lives anyway of course, but there’s little doubt that we are, as a species, poisoning ourselves via our oceans. Poetic justice? Arguably. I’d go so far as to call it karma, were it not for the fact that we seem intent on taking down every other species in the oceans with us when (or most likely before) we go.
What can be done?
There’s little that can be done about the waste that washes up on beaches other than organising regular beach clean ups. Indeed the John Muir Trust, who manage the Sandwood Estate and who do a great job preserving the bay’s wildness, organise such events every year in an effort to safeguard the beach environment. As do countless other charities and volunteers on other beaches up and down the land.
It’s commendable, but while it’s one thing to physically pick up the items you can clearly see, it’s another thing entirely to recover the billions of pieces of plastic that you can’t. You’d need to filter the beach through a sieve the size of a football pitch….but assuming you did, what would be the point?
I’ve been involved with clean ups of local parks in my job and it’s extremely satisfying when you leave them looking spotless. You feel optimistic and joyous at having so many volunteers come out to help. You take heart that there ARE people out there who want to take positive action and fight for a cleaner future.
But the following week the rubbish is back. The next storm dumps whole truck loads of it where you’ve cleaned, and every high tide brings more plastic to the beach….along with waves of apathy.
I admit I have apathetic moments where I feel powerless, when I wonder if what I’m trying to do is futile, because litter picking is like being one the last section on a giant production line. You try not to get buried in the waste being carried towards you but until you can get further up the conveyor belt and stop it at source, you’ll never tackle the problem.
However, even if you do manage to tackle it, the mess it has created still needs to be cleaned up. Futile as it seems we simply cannot let plastic build up in our environment. It’s a danger to wildlife and a danger to us, and doing nothing simply isn’t an option however apathetic we might feel.
How much plastic would I find in just one tiny square of beach?
To that end, some extraordinary suggestions have been put forward for cleaning our oceans. Vacuums, filters, dams, drains, drones and kites, you name it someone has looked into it, and if they sound far-fetched it’s because these are desperate times. Current consensus, however, is that the task is well beyond our abilities at this juncture, both technologically and financially. The ONLY option is to tackle the problem at source.
It’s got nothing to do with me
Having never knowingly dumped anything into the oceans you may well say it’s someone else’s fault, surely? But no. We’re all inextricably hardwired into the modern consumer society – using & discarding plastic packaging, plastic bags, flushing cosmetic products down the toilet, sending waste to landfill sites, relying on boats for our fish, and needing ships to cross the oceans to deliver our worldly goods. We’re all responsible whether we like it or not.
On an individual level we can try to eliminate single-use plastics from our lives. We can reduce, reuse and recycle. We can complain about packaging where it isn’t necessary. We can demand that our waste management is slicker, and the cost of packaging perhaps increased to better reflect the cost of cleaning it up, or to simply make it too valuable to throw away. But if that all seems insurmountable or just a drop of gaudy plastic in the ocean….well I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so.
Back on the beach…
After a couple of hours of rather forlornly and aimlessly roaming Sandwood Bay, long after the last two daytrippers had left, I found myself sat on a dune at the far northern end of the beach. It wasn’t quite the afternoon I’d planned but, in that moment of solitude with the golden sun emerging for the first time, Sandwood Bay looked exactly as I remembered it. Big, wild, remote and magnificent.
But I knew the problem was still there, at this beach and thousands others like it. I sighed. A long inhale to breathe in the salt-heavy maritime air, and a long exhale to expel the apathy and sadness welling up inside me.
As I walked back towards Blairmore I passed the blue crate. Half buried in sand I pictured it becoming a part of this beach every bit as inevitably as the rotting seaweed and the fragments of shells. Was that an acceptance of a simple fact? Or was it apathy? Either way, at that moment it was hard to feel any sense of optimism. And as I walked back to Blairmore the blanket bog looked unusually bleak…..but not nearly as bleak as our future.