Toothbrushes, make-up remover latest to be washed up on shores

Large numbers of make-up remover bottles and air fresheners are also being picked up, as well as Avant water bottles, which started appearing on beaches around 10 days ago following storms.

The local beachcombing group believes that the latest items are a cargo spill from a ship which was on its way to the market shelves of Lidl in Spain.

Anne and Malcolm Carre had gone for a swim at Moulin Huet on Monday morning and they picked up hundreds of toothbrushes, filling three bread bags to the brim.

Pierre Ehmann also went down to the beach and found hundreds more toothbrushes in the small bays that pop up at low tide between Moulin Huet and Petit Port.

He said it was a shocking sight.

‘When you see hundreds of a particular item wash up, you know that there are going to be hundreds more, the whole beach had been full of it,’ he said.

‘It’s not really the toothbrushes that are too bad, but there’s some sort of make-up remover and I’m assuming that the liquid inside is probably toxic to sea life, and also the air freshener, which didn’t really smell like air freshener.

‘I assume the toothbrushes were in packaging at some point, but I think once the cardboard disintegrates they become loose, the packaging the toothbrushes come in could be a bit like the bottles, that sort of plastic tends to degrade in the sea.

‘A good example of that is the air freshener bottles, most of them weren’t in packaging but some of them were, so it shows that in the sea it comes apart and breaks off.'

Environmental campaigner Richard Lord is used to seeing huge amounts of litter washing up on the shores, but even he has been surprised to see so many different products en masse in such a short of period of time.

He said he wanted companies to be held accountable.

‘It’s one thing to have volunteers on the shore picking the litter up, it’s been fantastic the community response, but obviously there’s a cost to the States of Guernsey to put all this stuff through the waste management system and sending it off to the UK for further processing.

‘Beach litter is a constant menace on our shore, we have some very dedicated volunteers who go out on an almost daily basis. There’s a phenomenal amount that washes up on our shores, it’s tonnes.

‘It’s plastic, it stays for a very long time, it’s forever, and it just gets ground up by rocky shores, so if it’s not picked up it enters the food chain. Really we have to stop it at source.’