Volunteers clean beaches after container spills

Volunteers are cleaning up beaches across the Sussex coast as shipping containers and their spilled contents have been washing up on beaches.

Oliver Blackaby, 51, said when he went to clear up Brighton beach on Wednesday morning, he found "lots of face masks, disposable gloves, packaging from the crates and various other bits of plastic".

Three shipping containers washed up in Seaford on Tuesday, and more than 16 containers have fallen from ships near the Isle of Wight in the last month.

Community group BHASS Explore is organising a beach clean at Seven Sisters Country Park on Saturday, and near Seaford Head on Sunday.

HM Coastguard confirmed it had sent a team to three shipping containers washed ashore in Seaford and that a contracted salvage vessel had recovered a container off Littlehampton on Tuesday.

Containers at Selsey, Eastbourne, Newhaven, Rustington, Rottingdean and Beachey Head were being monitored and it sent an aircraft on Thursday morning to "surveil the area", a spokesperson added.

Blackaby, who owns a hair salon in Brighton, said he saw a callout from the campaign Leave No Trace Brighton asking people to help with an influx of debris along the seafront in Brighton and Hove.

"I just walked up the beach and picked up all the plastics that I could find," he said.

"I swim in the sea all the time, so it's very dear to my heart.

"Whenever anything like this comes up it always makes me feel anxious, and I just want to get down there and help out."

Brighton & Hove councillor Birgit Miller told BBC Radio Sussex that the local authority was sending out its own cleaning teams, but said she was "so grateful" to volunteers who had been "phenomenal".

Miller said: "A full shipping container breaking up near the coastline will dump an awful lot of rubbish, so it's not going to be a half day's effort, this is actually a major operation."

She advised anyone who wanted to help clear debris to wear gloves and use a litter picker.

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