Government needs to stop litter ending up in Scotland's seas, watchdog says

The Scottish Government needs to take more action to stop litter ending up in the country’s seas, according to the environment watchdog which found more rubbish is collected on beaches in Scotland than the rest of the UK.

Environmental Standards Scotland is calling on the Government to reduce how much waste is produced in order to stop so much ending up in the sea.

A study carried out in Orkney showed 80% of marine life collected from the seagrass beds contained microplastics. Marine litter has also been linked to wider ecosystem-level impacts, such as changes in species’ growth and feeding rates, including growth rates and tissue health of cold-water corals in Scotland.

The report found that beach cleans here would pick up 919 items of litter per 100m of beach – significantly worse than the rest of the UK. Although data is limited so it’s difficult to make a fair comparison.

The watchdog wants more data to be collected and for more legislation to be brought in to reduce the waste ending up in the water.

“Marine litter is a problem in Scotland endangering our marine species, spoiling our beaches and introducing potentially harmful microplastics into the human food chain,” said Mark Roberts, CEO of Environmental Standards Scotland (ESS).

“The latest assessments show a failure to meet statutory targets designed to improve the situation.

“Today we are calling on the Scottish Government to embed a ‘source-to-sea’ approach to tackle the problem. This requires legislation and policy to be developed that considers the relationship between land and sea. Most marine litter comes from the land so we need to stop litter at its source, before it reaches the marine environment.”

The Scottish Government says it recognises more needs to be done to tackle marine litter and that it’s already banned some of the most commonly littered single use items.

It said that new legislation gave it more powers to do more to protect the country’s seas.