Why plogging: what dirty beaches and parks really mean
From a distance, beaches and parks look clean. Up close you find cigarette butts, bottle caps and fragments of plastic that sooner or later reach the sea.
7%
of the world’s microplastics
are in the Mediterranean, a sea that holds only 1% of the planet’s water. [1]
26.1 kg
of plastic per km of coast, every day
build up on the shore of Barcelona, our first city: the second-highest figure in the Mediterranean. [2]
60
million cigarette butts
collected in international coastal cleanups since 1986. They are the most common item of all. [3]
1
cigarette butt per litre of water
is enough to kill half of the fish exposed to it in laboratory tests. [4]
+40%
more litter in summer
reaches the Mediterranean when more than 200 million tourists visit its coasts. [1]
Plastic never disappears
Sun and waves break bottles, bags and caps into microplastics. Fish and seabirds swallow them, and they enter the food chain.
A cigarette butt is not paper
The filter is made of plastic fibres and holds nicotine and other toxic substances that leak into the water. Since 2022 smoking has been banned on all ten Barcelona beaches, but a butt dropped in a street or a park can still reach the sea with the rain. [5]
That is why we clean parks too
What is left on the grass today can be on the beach after the next storm. Every bottle picked up in a park is one less in the sea.
Our answer: plogging with music
Plogging was born in Sweden around 2016: you pick up litter while you move. We add three live DJs, because cleaning is easier with music in your ears, people come back next time, and every kilo is weighed, so the result can be measured. [6]
Sources
- [1] WWF, Out of the Plastic Trap (2018)
- [2] WWF, Stop the Flood of Plastic (2019), via Ecoticias
- [3] Ocean Conservancy, International Coastal Cleanup report (2023)
- [4] Novotny et al., Tobacco Control (2011), citing Slaughter et al.
- [5] Público, Barcelona smoke-free beaches (2022)
- [6] Plogging, Wikipedia