Sunday, 24 July 2022 | 17.8°C Dublin

Volunteers collected more than 40kg of litter on Bray Beach last Monday.

bp - emacraghnaill - bray coast cleaners

bp - emacraghnaill - bray coast cleaners

Bray Coast Cleaners have issued an appeal to the public ahead of this weekend’s Bray Air Display to treat the area ‘like it’s your home’ after being forced to collect 40kg of waste from Bray beach on Monday evening.

T he Bray Coast Cleaners, who meet every second Sunday at 10a.m., routinely sweep the beach area adjacent to the promenade, moving from north to south as they collect all manner of rubbish. Ahead of this weekend’s Bray Air Display a spokesperson for the group is apprehensive about the potential fallout.

“After the BBQ festival last weekend and the good weather on Monday the problem with littering reached a new low,” the spokesperson said.  “If you’re coming to the beach this weekend, please leave it the way you found it. If a bin is full, find another one – there are plenty of them. If you can’t find an empty one, bring your rubbish home.

“When you’re living somewhere and it’s your home, these things become very important to people. Please treat Bray beach like it’s your home.”

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On Monday evening, after two volunteers were shocked at what they saw, Bray Coast Cleaners posted a last minute call to arms on their Instagram, inviting people to go down to the seafront to take action.

“When we arrived we couldn’t believe the sheer volume of waste,” the spokesperson explained. “We ended up collecting more than 40kg of debris from the beach. There were empty beer bottles, food waste, clothes, nappies, towels – you name it, it was left on the beach.”

While the spokesperson couldn’t say for sure if any of the waste they collected had been there since the weekend, they claimed that the majority of it had been left by people sitting on the beach on Monday afternoon.

“Whenever an event is on in Bray there are always waste management personnel and Council workers in place, and it’s obviously not enough. There are simply more people littering than there are resources to pick it up.

“However, the Council’s lack of available staff, or a festival’s waste management plan are not the real issues here. After all, this was Monday night. It’s the people on the beach, that’s the real problem.

“It’s a coast wide trend, not just a bi-product of festivals. I saw a recent report on RTE about a beach on the north side of Dublin and it was the exact same thing we experienced. I saw the same again in Killiney.

“Groups come to Bray beach in the nice weather and treat it like a dump. We clean the beach all year round. In the winter you might find a couple of kilos of rubbish on a Sunday. In the summer, it’s easily four, five, six times that. People don't take any responsibility for their own waste. If a bin is overflowing they just add to it. I hate to say it but a lot of it is associated with alcohol.”

They added: “Some people go half way. They box up their empty bottles and cans. But then it’s just left there, as if it will just magically vanish overnight. But by far the worst part of it all, and I can’t stress this enough, is seeing people just get up and leave their litter on the beach. I’ve seen groups of people having a great time enjoying the beach, but when it comes time to leave, they just stand up and walk away like it’s nothing.

‘You wouldn’t get this behaviour on a beach in France or Spain. It seems to be a community responsibility over there. Or maybe it’s just a case that no-one does it. So that leads you to think: maybe we have to do more to educate, especially young children, on having a respect for the environment.”

In an attempt to counter-act this lack of respect for the area, the Bray Air Display team say there will be designated litter teams allocated to the event across the weekend and into Monday. The teams will be litter picking throughout the duration of the event and afterwards.

Additional bins will be provided along the seafront during the event and Bray Air Display will be using their social media networks to promote ‘Leave no trace’ principles to help create a better awareness and improve behaviour.

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