Fleetwood and Cleveleys Lions have bottle for plastics battle

They certainly had a lot of bottle when Fleetwood and Cleveleys Lions staged an environmental project with a difference.
Fleetwood and Cleveleys Lions make a point with bottlesFleetwood and Cleveleys Lions make a point with bottles
Fleetwood and Cleveleys Lions make a point with bottles

The Lions organised the event at Fleetwood YMCA swimming pool to highlight the challenge faced by plastic waste.

To demonstrate the issue, they filled the pool with plastic bottles and invited members of Fleetwood Sea cadets, school children and the Mayor and Mayoress of Wyre, Anne Turner and Andrea Kay, along to the event.

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Lions member Stuart Gratrix, who helped co-ordinate the project, said: “One of the main aims was to get the message across to the young people, but they are already very well up on the issues, perhaps more than the older generation is.

“We had more than 200 bottles to put in the pool and in all the years I’ve been involved with the Lions, we’ve never done anything quite like it.

“The idea was that if we don’t cut down on our plastic waste, this is what we are going to be faced with.

“Every month we hear about the latest environmental disaster - marine animals dying because they’re choked by plastic - and the children already knew about this.

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“Those in the pool had great fun and really got into the spirit of the event. They were asked to guess how many bottles were in the pool and this was won by a young lad called Liam Dempsey who got the nearest.”

Stuart thanked the YMCA for providing free use of the pool on Sunday and the Life Guards for helping, as well as all those who attended.

At least eight million tons of plastic end up in our oceans every year.

Floating plastic debris is currently the most abundant type of marine litter.

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Waste plastic makes up 80 per cent of all marine debris from surface waters to deep-sea sediments.

Environmentalists, including naturalist Sir David Attenborough, are warning that the sheer amount of plastic in our oceans and seas, including the Irish Sea, is killing sea mammals such as whales and porpoises, as well as fish.

And they say it is also getting into the food chain, meaning that humans are also unwittingly consuming plastic from the oceans.