Ben Fogle leads the charge to clean Climping beach

CELEBRITY adventurer and television presenter Ben Fogle returned to his roots to lead a band of about 100 volunteers in a mass clean-up on Climping beach, on Monday (May 6).
Ben and the band of helpersBen and the band of helpers
Ben and the band of helpers

The army of helpers, armed with plastic bags, buckets and gloves, shifted a staggering quarter of a tonne’s worth of rubbish from the coastal stretch in little more than two hours.

Ben, who just a day earlier was riding camels through the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula, is the ambassador for the national Barefoot Wine Beach Rescue Project.

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The event, which is now in its sixth year, kicked-off the campaign trail for this season.

Everything from rope, plastic debris and wooden crates, to drinks bottles and carelessly-discarded shampoo containers was plucked from the shingle and sand by the team.

Ben, who visits Climping beach every few months and grew up in Ford, said: “Taking care of the environment is a key priority for me. It’s so, so important.

“And coming back to Climping, a place where I spent a great deal of my childhood, seemed like a nice place to start.

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“The whole concept of today is to educate people in simple things which can protect the ecosystem.

“When you look at a beach like this, it seems pretty clean, but if you scratch the surface you’ll see there is so much litter. It’s quite surprising.”

The clean-up saw Ben and the volunteers team up with campaigners of environmental charity Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), who spoke about the dangers plastics can have on local wildlife.

Dom Ferris, campaigns officer for the charity, told the team that a simple plastic bottle could take anything between 450 and 1,000 years to degrade, adding that thousands of birds, fish and other marine life die every year after eating or getting entangled in the waste.

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Ben said that simple things like not flushing cotton buds down the toilet could dramatically help to reduce the amount of waste washed up on the coastline.

“It’s all just about raising awareness of the issue. The more we can highlight the problem the more chance of people taking note,” he said.

Last year’s collection resulted in more than three tonnes of litter collected from beaches up and down the country, with recent figures suggesting that there are around 2,000 items of marine litter for every kilometre of the UK’s coastline.

For full pictures, see this week’s Gazette (Thursday, May 9).

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