Brit couple’s effort to ‘save the environment’.

A quiet drink in a seafront cafe in La Mata turned into a bid to help save the environment on Wednesday for two Brit ex/pat families.

It started when wind whipped up outside the cafe and a whirlwind developed with plastic bags of all shapes, sizes and colours being hurtled into the air.

When they got outside they discovered the nearby road where a street market had been held earlier was a sea of plastic bags. And the ever increasing wind was blowing it all across a boat park and sand and into the sea.

Eileen and Tony Mayes and Pete and Kate Goodger got busy grabbing hold of the wind/blown plastic, trying to stop at least some of it from getting into the sea. Three large bags full were collected, but it was only a drop in the ocean compared with all the plastics and other rubbish already in the sea and still along the market road.

Said Tony Mayes: “To leave a road after the market had gone with so much rubbish in it is ridiculous. Not once council employee or refuse lorry was to be seen. Market traders had left hundreds upon hundreds of plastic bags on the road, all destined to be blown into the sea.

“We are hearing over and over on TV news programmes about the volume of plastic entering our seas and oceans eaten by fish which are being killed by all the rubbish.

Quite rightly there’s a massive campaign in Britain to deal with plastics but it is totally useless if other countries couldn’t care less about the environment.

The local council should be ashamed of itself not bothering to clean up after the weekly market. It would be interesting to calculate how many tons of plastics have entered the Mediterranean from the La Mata market alone because traders couldn’t care less about the environment and interested only in making money.

He added that the world needs to change its attitude to the environment quickly to avoid major problems. The world has an increasing population which will need feeding – and allowing any rubbish, and particularly plastics to get into the oceans to kill our fish food stocks is simply crazy.