Video: 70-year-old woman decided to make the world a better place and cleaned 52 beaches in a year
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Many make promises to themselves for the New Year, but not everyone sticks to them. Pat Smith, 70, watched a TV documentary on beach pollution just before the holiday - and promised herself to make her city cleaner in 2018. And starting in January, Pat didn't stop until the next January.
In her quest to make life around her cleaner and better, Pat Smith walked along the coast of her native Great Britain, or rather Cornwall, collecting bags of plastic waste beach after beach. “Pat often says that people complain when looking at any problem, why, they say, hasn't anyone done anything? And who should do something if not the people themselves? That is why Pat wanted to show by his own example that much can be done, especially if you campaign and help other people,”says Victoria Carpenter, Pat's friend.
Pat cleared 155 kilometers of the coastal zone in a year. Most often, she came across pieces of fishing nets and small plastic objects, such as bottle caps, plastic straws from sucking candy, cocktail tubes and shards of bottles. It would have been impossible for a 70-year-old woman to clear such a huge distance in a year, but Pat did not try to be a lonely hero - on the contrary, she constantly agitated other people to purify nature and attracted activists and ordinary passers-by. Pat phoned almost all eco-volunteers in her area to tell them about this action on their social media pages - and it worked! People started coming and helping Pat!
Although Pat admits that she did not always meet with support. Sometimes people mistook her for an employee of city services and told her that she “works badly, it’s so dirty right there”. “People don't understand that I'm doing this voluntarily,” says Pat. “We ourselves must take responsibility for the garbage around us and carry our own garbage to the trash can.”
READ ALSO: 16 Shocking Photo Confirmations of Terrible Ocean Pollution
In fact, for Pat Smith, the environmental issue has been acute for a long time - as the pensioner admits, she wants her children and grandchildren to live in a better place than it is now. And with these motives, two years ago, she launched a campaign in Cornwall to move away from plastic tubing. To date, Pat has agreed with 600 (!) Local organizations to discontinue the use of plastic tubes in favor of thick paper tubes. Pat called her campaign "The Last Pipe in Cornwall."
This year, the UK government announced that they will phase out the use of plastic straws across the country. Inspired by the success, Pat admits that now is the time to turn the attention of the public to other disposable items that we regularly buy and throw away. Such as, for example, disposable cups, plastic dishes or plastic bags offered by supermarkets.
Through her example, Pat Smith has inspired many people across the UK to take environmental issues more seriously. “We are all really happy and even surprised by the huge support we receive from people,” says Victoria Carpenter. “People are beginning to take care of the coastal area next to them, and even small children begin to remove plastic and stop littering - this especially warms our souls.”
“Most of the garbage that I collect on the shore is a common item that we use every day,” says Pat. - We all use them, and it's really shocking when you think that all this ends up in the world's oceans. Please, let's take a more meaningful approach to consumption. Let's protect our living planet for the sake of our children and grandchildren."
Read about how a 20-year-old guy found a way to clean the seas and oceans from plastic waste, read in our article on his invention.
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