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

In just 10 years, the Isle of Man has rid its beaches of plastic and earned Unesco status as a world leader in ocean protection. So how did it do it? 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.”  

    The island’s determination to protect the coastal environment from the multiple threats of plastic pollution, climate change and overfishing has earned it the status of a Unesco biosphere region, designated because it is an outstanding example of a place where people and nature work in harmony. It is the only entire island jurisdiction to be granted the status. Read More