Beach Buddies heading south this weekend

A TRIP south to the Langness peninsula is the destination this weekend for Beach Buddies on Sunday morning.

Earlier this week we hosted a big group of cruise ship passengers at Castletown Bay and Derbyhaven, and we found large amounts of rubbish. So, we’re going back again – this time to Langness, meeting at 10.30am in the Langness car park, a short walk from the lighthouse.

The cruise ship event for Hurtigruten saw 158 people take part, all from Norway and Sweden – and they were full of praise for the Isle of Man. They were all amazed by the beauty of our island, and the cleanliness of our roads, parks, glens and public places.

They said the Isle of Man was “much cleaner” than their home countries – a fantastic endorsement for our community. But they also wanted to know why we don’t publicise the fact that the Isle of Man is such a stunning place. “You are keeping this beautiful place a secret”, one Swedish visitor said.

The beach cleaning event made history as the world’s first ever beach cleaning activity organised for large numbers of cruise ship passengers, and already we’ve been asked to host another event for a different cruise company in the coming months. This looks like it could take off big style!

Sunday’s event ends no later than 12 noon. As always, we supply all the equipment and remove everything afterwards, recycling as much as possible, including plastics, tin cans, glass bottles, metals and hard plastics. The rest goes to the Energy From Waste plant to make electricity.

• Beach Buddies is sponsored by FIM Capital and receives annual funding from DEFA.

Collection Bins

Beach Buddies provides, manages and maintains a network of 50+ collection bins around the island to encourage and enable members of the public to collect and safely dispose of beach rubbish. Our team visits each of the bins each week or fortnight depending on location and season to empty the contents and ensure the bin is in good order. We recycle what we can and depose of the remainder at the Energy From Waste facility. Last year we deposited over 20 tonnes of rubbish in this way. This is at the core of operation as well as being the most intensive of our activities.