Volunteers collecting bruck on Scapa Beach
Photograph by Orkney Photographic
What is Bag The Bruck?
Every spring Environmental Concern Orkney organises a massive voluntary
clean-up of rubbish on over 50 sites in the Orkney Islands, mostly on the many beaches
around our shores. The Orcadian word for rubbish is “Bruck” and hence the
clean-up is known by everybody as “BAG
THE BRUCK”. Many individuals and organisations,
totalling more than 500 volunteers, are involved in the effort and thousands of bags of
bruck weighing several tonnes are collected each year. Bag the Bruck has been a major
event in the islands since 1993.The cleanup of beaches, lochsides, ditches and road verges couldn’t take place without the generous time and effort provided by the volunteers who take part, and ECO thanks all of these volunteers for their very kind help in keeping Orkney beautiful. Every single volunteer makes a difference! Each year a local business kindly sponsors the event and Orkney Islands Council also kindly helps out by providing bags and gloves, and collecting the full Bag the Bruck bags from all over the County. The event gains much media exposure - here are two articles that have appeared in the newspapers:
BEACH CLEAN-UP REVEALS NETS THREAT
TO WILDLIFE
by David HartleyTO WILDLIFE
(Press and Journal, April 2002)
A plea for Government action to tackle the growing threat to wildlife posed by discarded fishing nets was made in Orkney yesterday. The move follows the gathering together of a huge pile of tangled netting, recovered during the islands’ annual beach clean-up Bag the Bruck. Ross Flett, chairman of Orkney Seal Rescue, visited just six of the beaches with his 20 year old son Erland, collecting netting that could be manhandled from the shoreline. “We’ve ended up with a pile 10 feet tall” said Mr Flett. “But we had to leave behind netting so heavy it would have needed a digger to move it - there must be hundreds of tonnes of the stuff lying around the coast of Orkney.”
Environmental Concern Orkney (ECO), organisers of the Bag the Bruck, worked in partnership with Mr Flett during this year’s rubbish gathering. Volunteers separated netting, twine, rope and gathered it into bundles so that Mr Flett could collect a sample and photograph it to highlight the danger it can pose to marine mammals and seabirds. He regularly sees seals with injuries caused by discarded netting. Some have “necklaces” of netting which penetrates the pup’s skin as it grows. “It can be very difficult to removes from an adult seal and often leads to them suffering an agonising death,” said Mr Flett. “As well as other species of mammals like otters, we also see seabirds like gannets and cormorants that have died after becoming tangled up. The dumping of netting at sea must be having a devastating effect on wildlife around the coast.”
Ross Flett from Orkney Seal Rescue Centre with some of the netting
that he found during the Bag The Bruck weekend
Photograph by Orkney Photographic
ECO secretary Susan Ferguson said this year’s Bag the Bruck, sponsored by Highland Park distillery, promised to be the biggest yet. With some areas still waiting to be cleaned up, the final tally looks like being 53 sites across the islands tackled by more than 500 volunteers. A first for the event was notched up when roads and verges were cleared of litter in Harray, Sandwick, and Birsay. Islanders in Stronsay gathered 277 bags of rubbish from Housebay and the Bu Sands. Susan Ferguson said: “The event had to be cancelled last year because of the foot and mouth access concerns. We were worried that people would be put off from getting involved this year. But people seem have become irritated by the amount of rubbish they’ve seen around the place and that seems to have spurred them on to get involved. They turned out in force and, by the time it’s over, thousands of bags of unsightly rubbish will have been collected and removed from Orkney beaches and countryside.
TIME TO “BAG THE BRUCK” AGAIN
(The Orcadian, 21 March 2002)Bag the Bruck - Orkney’s beach cleaning initiative - is back, after a year off due to foot-and-mouth. Environmental concern Orkney say they are hoping to have their eighth successful Bag the Bruck on the weekend of Saturday and Sunday, April 20th and 21st.
ECO’s secretary, Susan Ferguson told The Orcadian, “We are very grateful to Highland Park for supporting our cleanup project.They have kindly offered to sponsor the advertising and administration costs of Bag the Bruck 2002, which is a tremendous help to our voluntary organisation. Last year the Orkney - wide ‘Bag the Bruck’ Cleanup had to be cancelled due to the “foot and mouth” crisis. However, we are hopeful that with the two year break, all our regular volunteers will feel revived and refreshed - ready for another great onslaught this year!”
On her travels, she said she couldn’t help but notice the poor state of the local beaches. “Missing last year’s cleanup has contributed to apparent growth in rubbish and this, coupled with the large numbers of gales and particularly high tides, throwing up feed bags, baler plastic, plastic bottles, netting, twine from all over, means we really have quite a task on our hands. This cleanup can only be successful with willing volunteers prepared to give up some time” she said. “However, it isn’t just our beaches which need attention of course; many of our foreshores, road verges, and lochsides are littered with unsightly rubbish.”
“The ‘Bag the Bruck’ supporters have, over the past seven years, tried to show they cared about Orkney by raising awareness of these issues, successfully clearing tonnes of rubbish from our countryside. ECO has many individuals, groups and organisations who turn out each year to make a difference. We do, however, need further information and more help.With your help we can keep Orkney looking pristine over the summer months at least and, more importantly, ensure that less wildlife will die or suffer injury by waste debris.”
She concluded: “ECO is primarily an environmental / animal welfare organisation. We are acutely aware that our main industries and local businesses rely on a clean Orkney environment and image. For all these reasons the annual cleanup is vital to us all.”
The types of litter we find
It is a little disheartening for all those involved in cleanups around
Orkney to note that nothing much has changed over the years. The evidence of lack of
individual and commercial responsibility is right there, where ever you go. Some people
and industries still perpetuate this “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. The
bulk of this polluting debris, some 60%, comes in the form of fish netting, rope, twine
from around the packaging of frozen bait boxes, plastic fish boxes etc.,etc. A further 25%
comes from fertiliser, fish feed, animal feed and plastic baler bags, plastic mineral
containers, grease guns etc. Some sweet wrappers and cans are also in evidence, but most
of the remaining 15% comes in the form of general plastics - cleaning bottles, cooking oil
containers and other “unnecessary plastic objects”, dumped presumably from
passing ships and boats. For more information on marine plastic litter, read the report
Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans (pdf).Those who have taken part each year say they see a difference from the first Bag The Bruck in 1993. They’ve certainly broken the back of the tangled nasties which have been buried for decades, but we are, every year, still clearing tonnes of waste that is littering Orkney.
What’s more disturbing is that despite the excellent Civic Amenity Centres there are still some hardcore ‘fly tippers,’ who dump all sorts - builders rubble, fridges, tractor axles and wheels, televisions, mattresses over the shore, cliffs, in fields and on the beaches.
Soon hopefully, there will be a way of ensuring and enforcing the “Polluter Pays” principle fairly, so that we all have to take responsibility for our own waste and deal with it at source, both at industry and individual level. Certainly all the debris that our 545 volunteers picked up did not accidentally enter the environment.
Some of the main areas of concern identified by ECO and members of the public are beaches / coastline opposite fish farm installations and creel operators’ equipment. Having visited some of these sites there is much of the paraphernalia associated with the fishing industry in evidence, some operators can do business relatively tidily, others seem to be unaware or heedless of their debris littering the environment.
Certainly, ECO have received quite a number of complaints from the public this year, citing the fish farming industry and agricultural farming as being responsible for eyesores and concern all over Orkney. These industries have to clean up their act! Fish farm operators and agricultural farmers must stop dumping both their new and ancient equipment wherever the mood takes them. Their dumping tarnishes Orkney’s reputation, much of it is unsafe, it spoils the visual enjoyment of their unfortunate neighbours, locals and tourists by having this debris strewn along our coastline. Ultimately dumping will affect the farming, fishing and tourism industry, since all of these businesses are interlinked with and dependent on Orkney being perceived as a place of natural and pristine beauty and one which all locals value.
It took millions of years for the world’s human population to rise from our obscure origins to about 2 billion in the 1930’s. By the 1990’s, this figure has risen to nearly 6 billion. There is therefore a huge quantitative increase in the demands that our species makes on the planet - demands both in respect of use of resources and demands in relation to the accumulation of waste products. Moreover, the kinds of waste products we generate are now, in many cases, far removed from the products that the absorbent capacity of the biosphere has ordinarily had to deal with over long periods of time. Our demands on the planet are therefore very different, qualitatively, from what they have been until very recently in human history.
Waste management is surely a responsibility for all of us, at present we are all aware of the ancient, rusting cars, fridges and farming equipment dotted all over our islands, but, in the not too distant future we will also have to contend with a huge number of massive plastic / polystyrene fish farm cage structures which have reached the end their working life, what do we do with them and ultimately whose responsibility is it to deal with this waste?
