1. Surfers Against Sewage: Surfers Against Sewage is a national marine conservation and campaigning charity that inspires, unites and empowers communities to take action to protect oceans, beaches, waves and wildlife.
What we will be working on today: Be The Change was created because we need your help. We are facing a problem so great that we need the help of everyone and we were hoping we could ask you to join us!?
What YOU enjoy:
- an exercise to immediately connect pupils to the importance of tackling litter (while having a bit of fun!)
- you will begin by asking the pupils to raise an arm, leg, tongue or nose if they enjoy any of the following statements, or make up your own!
- “Who here enjoys going to the beach in summer”, “who here enjoys playing football”, “who here enjoys riding their bike”, “who here enjoys jumping in puddles”
- Ask what all of these activities have in common? THE OUTDOORS: and that is what we are here to protect, are you ready for a challenge?
Lets make a positive impact to our communities and places we love !

2. Since March 2016 Be The Change has worked with over 7000 pupils in Cornwall, Liverpool, Newcastle, Essex, Birmingham, Bristol and Edinburgh.
Now it’s your turn! We’ve taken our Be the Change Education programme online so that every pupil in the UK has the chance to be involved! How cool is that!? 25 schools around the UK will be joining you this week in:
Exploring the effect that litter has on our environment
Investigating whether litter and plastic pollution is a problem in our school / community
Applying our knowledge and skills to create new solutions to tackle this issue locally

3. It doesn’t end after this week!
Be The change is an award scheme too!
You will be invited to enter your Anti-Litter Action Plans for your school, into the annual Be The Change Awards
The winning school will receive a £250 grant to implement their idea in their school!
Entries for the Be The Change Online awards close on June 18th at 3 PM winners will be announced when you return from your Easter break on Friday 16th June via the Surfers Against Sewage website.

4. So now you know a little more about the programme you need to find out about the problem.
It may sound a little extreme but we are currently slap bang in the middle of a litter DISASTER!
Everyday in the UK 2.25 MILLION pieces of litter are dropped on the street
Can anyone tell me what litter is ?
The dictionary definition of litter is: ‘ Rubbish such as paper, cans, and bottles left lying in an open or public place.’ so it is something that has been left where it shouldn’t have been … forgotten about!
How does this make you feel? Would you want to play here?
[ Optional activity – helmet of truth ]
Now I need to very brave and honest helpers… you are going to have to wear these helmets, they are pretty special actually, they let you speak the truth without getting into trouble or anyone judging you.
So I have a series of very important questions I need to ask you all, I would like you to put your hand up in the air if you have ever littered….
Ok good I hope that after today I might be able to change everyone's mind about littering, I have definitely littered before but I don’t think when I had done it I thought about what would happen to that litter.
General litter stats from Keep Britain Tidy(1)
About 2.25 million pieces of litter are dropped on the streets of the UK every day.
Thirty million tons of rubbish are collected from England’s streets each year.
That’s enough to fill Wembley Stadium four times over and costs over a billion pound to clean up.
Keep Britain Tidy(8) reported the most common type of litter found in 73% of surveyed areas was smoking related debris, followed by confectionary packs (61%) and non-alcoholic drinks related debris (52%). There are 122 tonnes of cigarette butts dropped daily in the UK, which is the equivalent of eight and a half London buses(9).

5. Presenter note: This is a good opportunity to swap to a more local image, telling a relatable story!
This image is my local beach, Perranporth. Litter and plastic pollution is now a sad but expected sight at every beach in the world.
What do you think most of this litter washing up on beaches across the world is made from?
Plastic! An amazing material that we use in an incredibly silly way.
Item show and tell: retro rubbish, strange finds, fishing net etc etc …
How long until it’s gone.
[Optional Activity – the plastic bottle and the apple]
This activity is a great way to demonstrate the scale of the problem we face, make sure you have two props with you. A plastic bottle and an apple! Both of these items are things you might have with you in your bags today. Now for the purpose of this experiment I am going to drop them on the floor as if I have littered.
When these items are littered on our streets there is one main difference in how they behave.
Can anyone tell me what would happen to this apple if I was to leave it here on the floor?
ROT / Biodegrade; ‘be decomposed by bacteria or other living organisms’ In simple terms that means it is used by life for life, if I was a hungry hedgehog I could gain nutrients from this piece of fruit and when it rots into the ground the soil too will gain nutrients from it.
A plastic bottle on the other hand acts very differently. If I was to leave this on the floor here does anyone know how long this bottle will stay looking like this? Answer: 400 – 1000 years, but it will never go completely. As plastic gets older it gets very brittle, snapping into smaller and smaller pieces which can be mistaken for food and cause harm to habitats.
Fact #1: every day in the UK we use 3.85 MILLION single use plastic bottles, a number too great to imagine
3.85 MILLION single-use plastic bottles are used every single day in the UK - That is 1 million per minute.
Many of these do not get recycled or disposed of correctly and end up escaping out into the environment and causing continued harm to the places we love.
Shockingly there are now 160 plastic bottles for every single mile of UK coastline… Each one of these bottles will last for 400+ years and break down into smaller and smaller pieces, entering food chains, and destroying natural habitats.
Plastic Pollution knows no boundaries, it flows from lunchboxes, bins, streets, parks into rivers which all end at the sea…

6. Why Change – harm to wildlife!
Ask everyone in the room to close their eyes and pretend that they are a really hungry turtle swimming through the sea searching for food (this is usually pretty fun!).
Increasingly turtles mistake pieces of plastic pollution for natural food items
A turtles favourite food is jellyfish, which as you can see from images like this are easily mistaken for plastic items like carrier bags.
Plastic pollution is found in 90 percent of seabirds. The rate is growing steadily as global production of plastics increases.
By 2050 it is estimated that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish!
This will inevitably increase the amount of wildlife dying with stomachs FULL of plastic.

7. The litter disaster is an issue of land and sea
Plastics make up 70% of all litter in the UK, the majority of which ends up in the seas.
8 million items of litter enter the sea every day
There are now 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean
This image was captured by a famous photographer while on a research trip in Indonesia
An interesting fact about Seahorses is that they are terrible swimmers. They ride the ocean currents by grasping floating objects with their tails.
This image is so shocking because it is something that just shouldn’t have happened.
Cotton bud sticks
A litter item that perfectly demonstrates the ‘source to sea’ nature of litter and plastic pollution.
We find thousands of these littered across our shores, they make their way from our homes through our toilets, all of which eventually lead to the sea.
There are four p’s and four p’s only that if we remember to flush down the toilet will stop thousands of pieces of plastic entering the ocean every day. A simple step that can make a huge difference.
PEE – PAPER – POO – PUKE
Not only are these items unsightly they persist in the environment for ever, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces and eventually being mistaken for food.
Just like litter on our streets WE are responsible for this and WE can do something about it!
Extra facts and figures – Sea focussed
8 million items of litter enter our oceans each day
Plastics make up 70% of all litter in the UK, the majority of which ends up in the seas.
There are now 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the oceans and rising
Of that mass, 269,000 tons floats on the surface (equivalent to 1492 Blue Whales at 181 tonnes each)
Four billion plastic microfibers per square kilometer litter the deep sea.
Litter can be found on every beach in the world, even those on remote and uninhabited islands.
The density of plastic litter found on UK beaches has increased by 146% between 1994 and Small plastic pieces have been the number one item found since 1998(7
Plastic doesn’t disappear it just breaks down into smaller and smaller plastic pieces that accumulate in our oceans and become a danger to marine life.
33 million single use bottles each day – 12 Billion per year
A plastic bottle can take up to 450 years to break down in the marine environment.
Plastic bags - The 2013 Marine Conservation Society Beachwatch survey recorded over 48 single use plastic bags for every km of beach surveyed
640,000 tonnes of lost or discarded fishing gear
ghost gear kills at least 136,000 seals, sea lions and large whales every year worldwide
Marine litter kills over 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million sea birds each year through ingestion and entanglement
Once in the ocean plastic can accumulate toxins naturally present in the environment, and can potentially release toxins incorporated at the point of manufacture, becoming toxic bombs!
The Usual Suspects – We see these items all too often on our beaches.
Find the marine litter Usual Suspects; plastic bottle, carrier bag, cigarette butt, confectionary wrapper, cotton bud sticks, mermaid’s tears, drinks cans, fishing line.
The vast majority of marine animal species from plankton to killer whales have been found to ingest plastic.

8. When Leo Bakelite invented the first form of plastic in 1907 he proclaimed it was the material of a thousand uses!
Questions:
what makes plastic so useful?
How many pieces of plastic are we touching right now?
Is plastic the problem?
No: The way we use this amazing material is the problem. It’s a material we use sometime for seconds and then throw away.
FACTS:
8.3 billion metric tons of plastic has been produced since the 1950’s
That is the equivalent of forty million blue whales > however due to human impacts there are only 25,000 blue whales left in the Ocean!!
do we remember what happens to plastic when it escapes into the environment?
Every piece of plastic that has ever been made still exists in some form!
PROGRESS TO LESSON ONE: PART THREE – BTC ANIMATION