Cornwall is a green and pleasant land in so many ways. CHRISSY HARRIS joins a young couple on a mission to clean up our seas - and to make something pretty in the process
It had been dark and stormy the night before we rocked up to Tregantle Beach in Whitsand Bay, south east Cornwall.
“I think we’ll find quite a lot of plastic today,” says Sam Gill, a lifelong beach cleaner. “Oh good, you’ve brought gloves. Right, are you ready?” This stretch of coastline is a beautifully unspoilt part of the county and popular with surfers, dog walkers and day-trippers over from Plymouth.
It’s proper Cornish-looking, all rugged and rolling waves with miles of golden sand. It’s also prime foraging territory for Sam and his partner Melissa Carne.
The couple, both 27, run Behaviour Change Cornwall, a business Sam set up in 2017 to recover washed-up plastic from his local coastline and turn it into something so much better.
‘Ghost nets’ (bits of abandoned fishing net) and any other ocean plastics are collected from Cornish beaches by Sam and teams of helpers before being taken back to base in Looe. Here, the various items are intensively cleaned and then recycled into beads, bracelets, coasters and keyrings.
Behaviour Change Cornwall’s range is growing all the time and Sam and Melissa’s creations have attracted a global customer following. But it all starts right here, on the beach at low tide.
We don’t have to venture far to start today’s collection. Brightly coloured nets, containers and tiny pieces of plastic (nurdles) are waiting for us at the foot of the steps down to the beach. There is also – grimly – a dead dolphin.
“We do see them occasionally,” says Sam, adding that spotting things like this only spurs him on. He spent years researching ways of changing environmentally damaging behaviour as part of his university degree in sustainable futures.
