Beach campaign piloted for Scotland's Beach Awards

A special edition of our My Beach Your Beach campaign is being piloted at four of Scotland's Beach Award beaches this summer, to support beach managers in keeping them beautiful.

Broughty Ferry and Aberdeen beaches in the east as well as Prestwick and Newton beaches in the west will be displaying campaign messaging and increasing bin visibility to remind beach goers to play their small part in helping to protect the sand and sea.

They will also be surveying litter levels in order to monitor the campaign's impact. If successful, these interventions will become available to all Scotland's Beach Award beaches.

My Beach Your Beach has been running since 2018 to support bathing water quality improvements at beaches where this is a challenge. Over the years it has evolved into a successful beach stewardship campaign, which is why this year, we have packaged elements of it up to make available to beach managers more broadly, through our Scotland's Beach Awards programme.

One of the key strands of My Beach Your Beach is to remind beach goers to be mindful and considerate with their habits around litter, dog poo and gull feeding. These simple habits can make a huge difference in keeping the beach clean for everyone to enjoy.

Georgina Massouraki, Campaigns Officer with Keep Scotland Beautiful said, “Our beaches are more precious than ever as so many of us have discovered during this past year of lockdowns. We are encouraging and supporting people to take a more active role in protecting these shared spaces and asking them to consider leaving the beach cleaner, rather than dirtier, than they found it. Plan ahead to leave no trace, simply taking an extra bag for your waste can help, and if everyone also picked up a few pieces of litter along the way it would make a massive difference.”

More information about the pilot and participating beaches can be found through the My Beach Your Beach website.