Islanders urged ‘love your beach’

Environmentalist groups across the Channel Islands are urging islanders to ‘love your beach,’ as part of an annual inter-island weekend-long beach clean.

Volunteers from the Clean Earth Trust and local businesses gathering at Rousse to clean the beach at Port Grat, as part of last year’s Big Channel Islands Beach Clean event. Left to right, Gavin Lanoe and Chris Gavey from C5 Alliance, with Fern Nicholson, who is a volunteer and coordinator for the Clean Earth Trust. (Picture by Luke Le Prevost, 31787857)

The Big Channel Islands Beach Clean will take place for the fifth time next weekend, 18 and 19 February, and will see organisations such as the Clean Earth Trust and Plastic Free Jersey join forces with members of the public to reduce pollution.

‘It’s simply about keeping our island clean,’ said CET project co-ordinator Olivia Bennett.

In Guernsey, Vazon will be the first beach cleaned with CET starting from 11am on Saturday 18 February.

The day after will be the turn of Pembroke, where islanders are asked to meet at noon.

Each event will likely run for a couple of hours, split half and half between cleaning and surveying.

There is no need to register for these and islanders can turn up whenever is best.

Around 40 people are expected to take part.

The initiative is not just open to those taking part in group-led cleans and anyone is able to clean a beach of their own choice while contributing to the event.

Those who choose to do this are asked to make a note of the date, island, name of beach, interesting finds, how many people participated, approximate weight in kg of collected items and to take pictures.

Once collated, this can either sent to one of the participating organisations or submitted to bit.ly/3XamtLp

n More information is available on the event Facebook page at bit.ly/3I5DWjY