In this two-part story, we’re exploring the history of International Coastal Cleanup Day. It’s a huge event which has been taking place in September for four decades now. Each year that day, hundreds of thousands of people swarm to the shorelines and collect and remove the trash they find. But beyond just cleaning up, International Coastal Cleanup Day is an important part of the science and politics of plastics. But how did it all begin? We share the little-known stories of the women who started this practice in the 1980s, mobilising citizens to put a global spotlight on plastic pollution, counting and classifying the trash, to produce invaluable data. And right from the beginning, the plastics and packaging industries were involved. Elsa Devienne, assistant professor in US history at Northumbria University in the UK, is the one who dug up this story. This episode was supported by a British Academy Leverhulme Small Grant.
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