The Big Pick

We teamed up with Dr Matthew Witt from the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute in 2014 to conduct various studies into the density and movement of certain types of litter on Tregantle Beach in Whitsand Bay.

Funded by the University’s Catalyst fund, the work culminated in May with a painstaking experiment called ‘The Big Pick’, in which we attempted to remove, sort and count all the plastic waste found in one small cove, just 25 metres wide. 

The whole project was tracked by local filmmaker Bryony Stokes, who turned it into this amazing six-minute film showing the progress of the Big Pick and the Herculean three-week counting process that followed it.