Saving the PLANET

Pat Smith, 71, started a one-woman campaign to clean up the ocean – one beach at a time

- HOLLY SAWYER, FRANCES LEATE

When Pat Smith’s youngest son, Mark, then 40, invited her to the cinema on Mother’s Day in March 2017 to watch a special showing of A Plastic Ocean, a documentary about plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, it was to have such an impact on the holiday cottage owner from Cornwall that her life was never really the same again.

The film shows a team of documentary makers who had set out to follow the lives of blue whales – only, devastatingly, they instead discovered that the world’s oceans were so saturated with plastic that the whales and other creatures living in and around the seas were struggling to survive.

The film highlighted the fact that every year, eight million tonnes of plastic are dumped in our oceans, to the extent that a dayold Laysan albatross chick would already have 276 tiny pieces of plastic in its body. Pat found the film horrifying, deeply upsetting and shameful.

‘Watching these beautiful creatures trying to swim and survive in an environment completely overwhelmed with pieces of plastic debris – from drink bottles to carrier bags and children’s toys – was absolutely heartbreaking,’ she remembers.

While many of us would have left the cinema that day feeling perhaps moved and, at most, motivated to use less plastic where we can and recycle a little more, Pat decided that wasn’t enough.