It’s been a really busy year for us at the Final Straw Solent. We are proud of how much we have achieved and incredibly thankful for all the support that we have received from local communities, schools, businesses and fellow environmental organisations. You can download our full report here, but in a nutshell these are some of our top moments over the last year!

• The number of businesses that have signed up to the campaign has increased over the last year, we now have 397 on our list which is incredible! All of these businesses have pledged to cut the amount of single-use plastic that they use.
• We went into 51 schools to give assemblies or run workshops
• 165 schools (65,000 students!) took part in our 8th May Plastic-Free Day, we were absolutely overwhelmed with the uptake and so thrilled that so many people supported it
• We ran 43 beach cleans, including public clean-ups and those run with businesses. The amount of rubbish we cleared from our local shores, with the help of so many fantastic volunteers, was in excess of 16,000 kilograms – that’s the equivalent of around 22 cows!
• We love Nellie the Final Fat Fish (pictured), who we commissioned and was built by the great guys at Sailboat Trailers. She has been travelling around the south coast, raising awareness of the impact of plastic pollution on our shores and highlighting the amount of single-use plastic used at lots of events in the area.

There is lots more in our Annual Review, which you can download here. Thanks as always to everyone who has supported us with time, energy and donations – it means such a lot to us and we are looking forward to reaching even more people and cleaning up even more over the coming year.