Late in 2017, Pat Smith, a grandmother from Cornwall, England, watched a documentary about plastic pollution. She was so disturbed by what she saw that she couldn’t sleep that night. The following morning, she decided that she would do what she could to make a difference and set herself the goal of cleaning up one beach per week over the course of 2018.
She would go to work with rubber gloves and plastic bags, sometimes on her own, sometimes enlisting the help of family or volunteers, and stuck with her resolution, working on beaches along southern England.
She also launched a campaign in Cornwall called The Final Straw, with the aim of raising awareness of the harm that plastic straws do and to encourage her hometown and the world to become plastic straw-free.
The inspirational granny was dubbed ‘Action Nan’ by the BBC Three channel. ‘I bother because I care,’ she told the BBC. ‘I care enough for my grandchildren to want them to have a little taste of the wonder that I’ve experienced.’
In one cleanup, Smith and a small team collected nine full bags of rubbish, and on another day the determined granny picked up 563 pieces of litter in just 90 minutes by herself.
‘If everyone followed #threeforthesea and picked up just three items of rubbish on each walk to the beach, what a difference it would make!’ she told Coastal Living.
Image: Pixabay
