Cardigan litter pickers were joined this weekend by beach cleaning legend Geraint John who is currently embarking on a mammoth 700-mile coastline litter-pick around Wales.
Geraint (pictured in the back, far right) joined the town residents as they carried out their latest clean-up around Cardigan town last Sunday morning.
And as a result of their efforts, the litter heroes gathered around a dozen sacks of rubbish including beer bottles and cans, many of which had been discarded along the hedgerows at Cardigan bypass.
Geraint, 51, decided to carry out his mammoth trek after circumnavigating the UK on his bike in 2022.
“Despite all the fantastic places that I went to, the image that was stuck in my head was all the rubbish that’s around the coastline of Britain,” he said.
“I started going to my local beach whenever I could, down near Maesteg, but I just felt it wasn’t enough,” said Geraint, who started his journey in the Mumbles, Swansea, on 13 May.
He said that anywhere east of Swansea ‘had too much rubbish for one man to collect’, so he turned his sights west, heading towards Pembrokeshire and Cardigan Bay.
Geraint is currently in Ceredigion where he’s clearing the beaches around Llangrannog, Cwmtydu and New Quay. But away from these popular beaches he’s also exploring the smaller, more remote coves.
“The vast majority of the Welsh coastline isn’t accessible, but rubbish doesn’t care where it washes up,” he said.
“You could spend half a day cleaning this beach and around the corner you could find ten tons of rubbish just sitting in some secluded cove.”
Rubbish that is discarded or that finds itself washed up on the beaches is having a devastating effect on the wildlife that inhabits these areas.
This includes species like birds or seals that get entangled in sea fishing lines while microplastics can get consumed by marine wildlife which subsequently disrupts their bodily functions and can result in them starving to death
