Go fishing for plastic pollution

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help.

Planning and setting up this activity

• Set up one towel per team, then add the items on them before everyone arrives. Make sure there’s the same number of items on each towel. You might want to use pictures instead of items. You could even add some fishes or natural objects, such as leaves.
• Put some buckets, bowls or containers next to each towel. You can label one with ‘recycling’ and one with ‘rubbish’.
• Books you could read to explore water include ‘Once Upon a Raindrop: The Story of Water ‘by James Carter, ‘The Little Drop of Water’ by Rob Holmes, or ‘Water: Exploring the Elements’ by Simone Akasha Nofel

Running this activity

1. Gather everyone together and ask if anyone knows what water pollution is. Water pollution is when harmful things, such as rubbish, oil or chemicals, get into water systems, such as rivers, lakes or oceans, and makes them dirty. Sometimes natural things, such as animal poo, algae, dead plants or lots of soil, can make water polluted too.
2. Ask everyone why rubbish in the water might be dangerous. It makes the water dirty and unsafe for fish, animals, plants and even people. It can hurt everything that lives in or near the water. That’s why it’s so important to keep water clean.
3. Explain that you’re going to play a game to help keep water clean. Our job is to help clean up the river!
4. Each team will have to use a toy fishing net to scoop the items from the blue towel, which represents the river, then place them in the correct bins. They should be placed in the recycling bin if they can be recycled or the rubbish bin if they can’t be recycled. They can leave any fishes in the water.
5.  Let everyone get into teams, with an adult in each team to help them.
6. Give the teams a countdown, then start fishing. Each person on the team could have a fishing net. Alternatively, the team could have one fishing net and you could make it relay. One at a time, someone races to the ‘river’, scoops an item, puts it in the container, then races back to their team to pass on the fishing net for the next person to go.
7.  As they clean, cheer them on, such as ‘Great job helping the fish!’ or ‘Now the ducks can swim happily!’
8. The first team to get all the items into the correct boxes, wins.
9. Gather everyone back together and ask everyone how those items may have ended up in the water. Sometimes, people don’t throw rubbish in the bin, and it ends up in the water. Sometimes bins might overflow, and the rubbish gets blown or swept into the water. Big weather events, such as floods, hurricanes or strong winds, can carry rubbish into waterways from land. Fishing lines, nets, and plastic waste from boats can end up in the water too.
10. Ask everyone how we can help to keep water clean. We can make sure our rubbish goes in bins, go litter picking with an adult, use less plastic and tell other people not to drop rubbish. We can also ask local changemakers to help us, such as by asking them to clean up a waterway or make sure bins have lids on them to stop rubbish blowing away. We can also stick to paths when visiting parks or rivers to avoid kicking up dirt that can get into the water. Plants and trees can help stop soil from washing into rivers and lakes, which keeps the water clear and clean.