Cleaning up...

Lotto winners’ inspirational litter pick for beach plastic

- PAUL BYRNE

HOW’S this for a lucky pick as National Lottery millionaires help clear plastic rubbish from a beach.

Yesterday’s tidy was aided by the 2 Minute Foundation, which asks people to spend a short time cleaning up the environment.

The manufacture of plastics is estimated to pump more than 850 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere just this year alone.

And Claire Giner from the charity said: “If we could recover all the plastic that already exists then we would not need to produce new plastic.”

In just an hour on New Brighton beach, Merseyside, the litter pickers found around 1,200 tiny pieces of micro plastics.