Pat Smith is a 70 year-old grandmother from Cornwall, England who has spent the past year cleaning up her local beaches.

For Pat, it all started on New Year’s Day of 2018, when she was suddenly inspired to start cleaning the beaches around her .

“I started on January 1, 2018,” Pat said.

“I did one beach a week for the whole year, apart from a couple of occasions where I did two. It was just a case of trying to do them wherever and whenever I could. It’s a case of once your eyes are opened to it, you can’t ever switch off.”

During her 104-hours of beach cleaning, Pat picked up an astonishing 13,000 pieces of litter, and she’s said that discarded plastic was the most common item of trash that she found.

The next most common items she found were disused fishing nets and lobster pots.

“The vast majority is broken up pieces of everyday used items, like bottle tops, toothpaste caps and broken up water bottles,” she said.

“Once some plastic gets into the sea the waves sort of bashes it up, so what we get on the beach is small bits of the remains. That’s unless we’ve had a violent storm. Sometimes when the storms really rage the waves carry in much bigger stuff.”

Pat was often joined on her excursions by her grandchildren Wilfred, 11, Megan, 9, Sam, 7 and Jasmine, 4, and it only brought her closer to them.

“My grandchildren are absolutely fantastic. They’re always calling me over and saying “Gran, some plastic! Gran, some plastic!’” she said.

“I pick up an awful lot of plastic, I can tell you!”

Pat is a physically fit woman who walked 305 miles of the Cornish coast in 21 days three years ago.

These days, she always keeps a bag and glove in her pocket at all times, saying it’s “in my DNA now.”

“It’s just what I do and hopefully my grandchildren will be doing the same thing,” Pat said. 

“I won’t stop, as our beaches need me!”

Find out more about Pat in the video below!