Though no official Pride events are held on Brighton beach itself, many residents and tourists flock to the iconic seafront over the course of Pride weekend. This year’s post-Pride beach clean found the seafront littered with thousands of balloons and empty nitrous oxide gas canisters by clean-up volunteers.
Despite being made illegal for psychoactive purposes in 2016, “noz” – nitrous oxide – remains the second-most popular drug for recreational abuse in the U.K. after cannabis. Volunteers involved in the beach clean were shocked at the extent of debris left by its users.
Ocean’s 8, a Brighton-based environmentalist group and founders of the Pier 2 Pier project, organised a silent disco beach clean that encouraged volunteers to dance alongside picking up litter. Up to 1,000 people got on board with the project this weekend, and those involved “said they had never seen so many nitrous oxide canisters in one place” (BBC).
The first two hours of Sunday morning’s clean up saw over 150 bags of rubbish filled by Ocean’s 8 volunteers. This is reportedly ten times more rubbish than the group would expect to collect after an entire weekend or event.
Amy Gibson, spearhead of the Pier 2 Pier silent disco beach clean, described the scope of the debris:
You couldn’t even see the beach in places.
Normally we find around 20 bags’ worth of rubbish after a weekend or an event, but we’ve collected 10 times that amount in the first two hours of today’s clean.
It’s Pride so we expected the glitter, the feather boas and the parts of people’s costumes, but I can’t believe how many noz canisters there are.
Clare Osborn, an environmental activist and blogger, expressed her concerns about the environmental impact of nitrous oxide canisters:
We sound like the fun police, but people really need to find more sustainable ways to have fun.
Every one of these canisters comes with a balloon, and they are so incredibly dangerous and deadly to wildlife, which can mistake the bits of balloon for food.
