Big Beach Clean-Up: Military Personnel Declare War On Rubbish In Portsmouth

When Philip Carpenter's four-year-old son got upset by the state of his local beach, the Private in the Adjunct General’s Corps knew he had to do something.

“It was my little boy who kicked started all this,” Carpenter said.

“Because of the state of the beach and debris, it upset him. So as a little child does at the age of four. ‘Daddy, what can we do?’ ‘Oh, we’ll clear it up, son!’

“As a result we’re now 200 people deep on the seafront, picking up anything from sanitary towels to nappies to general waste.”

Figures released last year by the Marine Conversation Society show that for every kilometre of beach in Britain there was an average of 7,180 pieces of litter washed ashore – a 10% increase on the figures from 2016.

In total more than 200 volunteers turned up at Langstone Harbour, just east of Portsmouth, for the beach clean-up organised by the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment Association.

For Matthew Rudman, Chairman of the Hants and Sussex Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment Association, the clean-up is exactly the kind of civic-minded duty that soldiers should perform:

“Us coming together as ex-servicemen, as veterans… to support the public. It shows that us as the local regiment… are here not only to defend the country but to support the country as well.”

Two hours cleaning on the beach filled 96 large bin liners full of rubbish, a drop in the ocean but enough to rid one beach of man-made waste and debris.