Sea dumps rubbish back at us

RECENT storms and awesome tidal surges not only did enormous damage to the coastline, they also washed in a startling volume of waste showing that large-scale dumping takes place at sea.

A post-storm walk along a south-western shoreline, in the past week, revealed a variety of discarded materials, mainly plastic but also pieces of fishing nets, Wellingtons, containers, food utensils, bottles and much more.

Not only is this stuff thrown overboard from vessels at sea, litter from land sources also gets into sewers, streams and rivers and ends up in the sea, posing additional threats to fish and the general marine environment.