Tidal wave of wet wipes on Malaga beach

In Malaga there has been an alert in recent days about plastic pellets being washed down from northern Spain to end up on Costa del Sol beaches.

However, all it takes to pollute our pristine beaches is thousands of unthinking residents flushing wet wipes down the toilet. This was the unpleasant discovery of an environmental group who had tasked themselves with clearing up Huelin beach in central Malaga.

What they found when they arrived wasn’t the plastic pellets from the container ship off Galicia’s coast but an ocean of shredded wet wipes deposited along the beach by the recent storm.

40 bags of rubbish

Volunteers from Finland, France and Germany joined locals to take part in the two-hour clean-up. Along with the wipes, what was most abundant during the operation were thousands of cigarette butts. Between the Huelin breakwater and the Pedro Gutiérrez picnic area, the volunteers removed some 40 bags of rubbish – about half of it for recycling – and two rusty bedsteads.

According to the Marine Conservation Society, every year billions of wet wipes are and around 90% of them contain plastic. When flushed into our sewers the plastic in wet wipes breaks down into microplastics, washing into the sea where they start to break down killing marine wildlife and clogging up our beaches.