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Flossie’s Beach Cleaners Pick Up Nearly Seven Tonnes of Rubbish From Irish Coast in 2024

4th January 2025
A scouring sponge was among the items picked up in a clean-up of Killiney Beach in November 2024
A scouring sponge was among the items picked up in a clean-up of Killiney Beach in November 2024 Credit: Flossie and the Beach Cleaners/Facebook

A beach cleaning initiative started by a young Dubliner picked up nearly seven tonnes of rubbish from Ireland’s beaches in 2024.

As the Irish Independent reports, Flossie and the Beach Cleaners recorded a total of 6,925kg of litter collected across 163 beach clean-ups throughout the year in their annual ‘Weigh-In’.

And the group has started the new year picking up more than 60kg of refuse across beaches in Sandycove and Killiney.

Flossie Donnelly started picking up litter from beaches near her home in south Dublin in the summer of 2017, and the now 17-year-old quickly inspired a national movement that even delivers workshops on plastic pollution and climate change to secondary schools.

Flossie herself says: “Another year of beach cleaning has gone by in what feels like a blink. This year our total weight does not reflect the state of our beaches or the sea.

"Nothing brings a smile to my face like finding a weird object on the beach, whatever it may be, but behind all the weird and wonderful finds is a lot of rubbish that keeps washing in or being left behind.”

The Irish Independent has more on the story HERE.

Published in Coastal Notes
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Coastal Notes Coastal Notes covers a broad spectrum of stories, events and developments in which some can be quirky and local in nature, while other stories are of national importance and are on-going, but whatever they are about, they need to be told.

Stories can be diverse and they can be influential, albeit some are more subtle than others in nature, while other events can be immediately felt. No more so felt, is firstly to those living along the coastal rim and rural isolated communities. Here the impact poses is increased to those directly linked with the sea, where daily lives are made from earning an income ashore and within coastal waters.

The topics in Coastal Notes can also be about the rare finding of sea-life creatures, a historic shipwreck lost to the passage of time and which has yet many a secret to tell. A trawler's net caught hauling more than fish but cannon balls dating to the Napoleonic era.

Also focusing the attention of Coastal Notes, are the maritime museums which are of national importance to maintaining access and knowledge of historical exhibits for future generations.

Equally to keep an eye on the present day, with activities of existing and planned projects in the pipeline from the wind and wave renewables sector and those of the energy exploration industry.

In addition Coastal Notes has many more angles to cover, be it the weekend boat leisure user taking a sedate cruise off a long straight beach on the coast beach and making a friend with a feathered companion along the way.

In complete contrast is to those who harvest the sea, using small boats based in harbours where infrastructure and safety poses an issue, before they set off to ply their trade at the foot of our highest sea cliffs along the rugged wild western seaboard.

It's all there, as Coastal Notes tells the stories that are arguably as varied to the environment from which they came from and indeed which shape people's interaction with the surrounding environment that is the natural world and our relationship with the sea.