King’s Baton Relay tied to ocean clean-up as commonwealth targets 1 million pieces of plastic

London: The ocean has its own international day today, but one campaign is trying to make sure the attention lasts longer than 24 hours.

For the first time, the King’s Baton Relay, the ceremonial journey that leads into the Commonwealth Games, has been linked to the Commonwealth Clean Oceans Plastics Campaign. The campaign is a partnership between Commonwealth Sport and the Royal Commonwealth Society.

Its target is practical and measurable: to stop one million pieces of plastic entering Commonwealth waters before the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games, which take place from 23 July to 2 August.

The campaign has already passed the halfway mark. According to Commonwealth Sport’s live tracker, more than 625,000 pieces of plastic have so far been collected by communities along the relay route.

World Ocean Day, marked each year on 8 June, was first proposed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and later formally recognised by the United Nations. Its purpose is to celebrate the ocean’s role in human life and focus attention on how it can be protected.

Clean-ups are taking place across Commonwealth nations and territories, with athletes, schools, conservation groups and local volunteers asked to take part. At West Kirby beach, Merseyside, in May, Team England’s leg of the campaign saw 25 people collect 21kg of rubbish, including 552 plastic items. Among them were 111 branded items from 56 different brands, a snapshot of how packaging waste travels from shops, streets and bins to the shoreline.

Ellie Simmonds, the five-time Paralympic gold medallist and former Commonwealth swimmer, joined volunteers on the sand as part of the clean-up.“Sport is so powerful, it can facilitate change,” she says. “I am very passionate about water, having spent many years swimming in a chlorinated pool, but since retiring I have been lucky to use my passion and be able to travel the world and work with lots of incredible ocean conservationists and gain lots of knowledge of why water and oceans are so important to preserve and look after.

”The Commonwealth Games, held every four years, brings together athletes from across the Commonwealth of Nations, spanning Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe and the Pacific. The baton relay has long been one of its most recognisable traditions, carrying a message from the head of the Commonwealth to the opening ceremony.

This time, organisers are using that journey as a practical route map for environmental action.The Commonwealth accounts for around a third of the world’s ocean waters, while almost half of Commonwealth countries are Small Island Developing States, many of them acutely exposed to marine pollution, rising seas and the waste that washes in from far beyond their own shores.