Friends of Dumbarton Foreshore
Sally McElroy led a team of volunteers from Merck on Wednesday at east shore, collecting 29 bags of refuse, 7 bags of recycling, 10 buckets of glass, 2 tyres, a wheel, a mattress, a supermarket trolley, a plastic gate, 6ft length of tubing, a breezeblock, a nerf gun and part of a car seat! Huge areas of invasive Himalayan balsam were cleared in the wood, on the meadow and at the top of the beach. A huge boost for the area, thank you to all involved!
Thank you also to Andy Devine and Greenspace for all their help.
Well done to all for the effort to make our environment cleaner.
It is however a tragedy that there is so much other waste, toxic waste at that, which volunteers cannot clean.
Dumbarton is a tip and there is no better example of this than the two old leaking landfill sites at Havoc and a bit further along towards Levengrove park. Here these two old landfill sites barely covered up egress clearly visible red discharges to pollute the Clyde foreshore.
Unrecorded and unmonitored by either the Council or SEPA these now hidden tips are left to discharge their cancer causing filth year after year.
But it’s not just tips beside the Clyde foreshore that are a huge health risk. All the water course around Auchecarroch that once used to teem fish are now dead. With the annual toxicology reports required by site operating licences, SEPA are well aware of the extent of the pollution. But for whatever reason they have sought to ignore this, despite these toxic discharges polluting not just the burns but the wider environment.
And now we have Flamingo Land going to build a resort on the Bonnie Banks with a tip containing many tens of millions of tonnes of every conceivable waste buried hidden in the hill overlooking their development..
Money talks and out of site is out of mind and sadly toxic waste is an insidious public health danger all too often only recognised when cancers and other diseases become apparent.
But yes, all credit to the volunteers for their hard work in cleaning up the foreshore. Pity our regulators and environmental protection agencies don’t have the same commitment to delivering a clean environment.