Milestone in project to haul tyres from seabed

The 500th tyre has been raised from Plymouth Sound marine park by dedicated volunteers, reports Carl Eve

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PEOPLE are being warned that Plymouth Sound is not their rubbish bin, as a project to clear the waters of the National Marine Park and surrounding estuaries of a worrying amount of trash reached a milestone.

The 1000 Tyres Project, launched by marine archaeologists from the SHIPS project that is charting and exploring the hundreds of wrecks in local waters, kept coming across tyres and junk, and so they mapped them and hatched a plan to clear them up - not least because the layers of litter were hampering marine life on the seabed and covering up important maritime history.

The work began in November 2020 and continues to this day, with the 500th tyre brought up on October 29 this year.

The 20kg tyre was found close the Breakwater Fort in the Sound and highlights a tiny portion of the detritus, waste and household rubbish which has been carelessly and callously tipped into the waters.

Mallory Haas is a maritime archaeologist and the director of the SHIPS Project in Plymouth, which is a local history nonprofit organisation specialising in maritime heritage.

She and her colleagues have been working hard behind the scenes on cleanups and recovering marine litter over the summer.

The passionate team of volunteers have been working from their RIB Minerva on raising as many tyres as possible.