Coastal Pollution Aerial Photography Project Coming to Orkney

That the Parliament welcomes the extension of the Scottish Coastal Rubbish Aerial Photography (SCRAPbook) project to Orkney, making it the first island group to benefit from the innovative initiative to map Scotland’s coastline using aerial photography in order to identify coastal litter pollution; notes that SCRAPbook has so far spent 150 hours flying around the coastlines of mainland Scotland and has produced an interactive map of its findings, with objective ratings of the levels of litter in specific locations; understands that such information can be invaluable in highlighting the extent of pollution on beaches and informing local volunteers, who can use the data in their clean-up efforts; recognises that most of the pollution is plastic, which can take decades or centuries to break down in water; notes with concern that the world’s seas currently contain 150 million tonnes of plastic with roughly 5 to 12 million tonnes more added each year; acknowledges that the economic impact of this pollution on the EU alone is estimated to be around €700 million for clean-up and fishing industry costs and that, by 2050, plastic is on course to outweigh fish in global oceans, and believes that this underscores the importance of concerted political action locally, nationally and internationally, both in removing such litter from the coastline but also reducing the amount of material ending up in oceans in the first place.