ilovemybed said:
My plant ecology Professor (who was eccentric to say the least...) used to tell us that we should deliberately go and litter the beach. His opinion was it would keep the tourists off which would help stop shore erosion, and improve the chances of dune growth as there was something more than sand for the plants to get hold of. He has a bit of a point - since they started a regular total clean-up of the beach (including natural detritus like seaweed and driftwood) the dunes at the West Sands of St. Andrews have receded a good few yards and are now seriously threatening to encroach on the Old Course (that may or may not be a good thing, depending on how you view golf...)
I assume, though, Tony, you just went for old nets, crisp packets and beer cans rather than everything on the beach...
I can see his point - problem is though that a lot of people are quite happy to sit amongst all the litter. After all if they drop it in the first place (people in general not just tourists!) it can't bother them too much! As you rightly point out the problem with clearing everything off the beach is that there is then little on which embryo dunes can form. This is the problem with using the beach cleaning machines. They tend to remove everything including natural debris.
At Merthyr Mawr its quite easy to see where dunes have formed on top of litter as it has trapped the sand. It is quite possible to find litter from the 1970's / 80's under the dunes. The problem comes when the dunes move and all the litter is exposed
Until someone can invent a machine that can remove litter but leave natural strandline material behind the best way is to clear the beach by hand.
The most demoralising thing however is no matter how much litter is cleared it can be back to the same mess in a couple of weeks.
Simple solution is not to drop the litter, and produce so much waste in the first place.
One other point (slightly off topic I know). Although the movement of the dunes and the removal of the beach strandline may be linked it may also be due to natural processes. Sand dunes do move over time and a healthy sand dune system needs mobile sand. I'll stop there as it would need a whole new thread to explain!