A sea change: how one small island showed us how to save our oceans

Standing on a windswept beach on the north-west coast of the Isle of Man, Bill Dale looked out on to plastic bottles, cartons and packaging forming a thick carpet covering the shingle. It was 2007, the global plastic binge was already well under way, but the millions of tonnes of waste seeping into the oceans as a consequence had not reached the public consciousness. “I was with a friend and we thought, ‘Let’s just clean up this one beach.’ We had no idea then of the scale of the problem.” It took six weekends, working long hours, to collect all the plastic litter. “We shifted 30,000 plastic bottles and large pieces of plastic,” said Dale. “You would pick one piece up, and underneath was another and another in layers. Some of the stuff went back 20 years.” How to grapple with soaring world population? An answer from Botswana Read more Today, as Dale stands outside an Edwardian summerhouse in the west of the island at Niarbyl bay, he believes Manx beaches are the cleanest in Europe. But the regular sweeps of the 100-mile coastline, conducted by his charity Beach Buddies, are just one facet of the island’s approach to […]

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