THE Saturday before last, with gulls screaming and oyster catchers piping, we took part in the Saltburn beach clean, along with about 130 others.

We selected the stones and the sands beside the beck, and at first, it looked fairly clean. But then you realise that the pounding of the waves tears the waste plastic into unidentifiable strips. The big pieces are like old bunting; the small pieces are like confetti.

In less than an hour, four of us filled three buckets with these torn shreds and shards, and ripped confectionery wrappings. We picked up two shoes (not matching), endless lengths of fishing ropes and numerous bits of nets. There was a couple of condoms, several Taprogge balls, loads of bottle lids, and scores and scores and scores of cotton bud sticks.

In fact, as our eyes tuned in, every stone we turned revealed more needle-thin, brittle plastic sticks. Once some people have scrubbed out their ears or removed their make-up, they flush them down the toilet, and, because the sticks are so thin, they can swim through the finest filter and end up on the beach. Last year, many supermarkets switched to paper sticks which decompose, but there are still decades of them out there, snapping into smaller pieces but never ceasing to exist, even when swallowed by the marine life that the gulls and the oyster catchers were seeking out.

For me, the Taprogge balls were a revelation. For years I’ve walked the beaches of the east coast and tried to work out why there were so many blue sponge balls, just a little smaller than a golf ball, stuck to stones when damp or blowing about in the seabreeze.

Now I know they were made in Germany by a company founded in 1953 by the Taprogge brothers, Ludwig and Josef. They are a genius way of cleaning pipes, usually employed by power stations. You select a spongey ball with a scoury exterior which has a diameter slightly bigger than your pipe. Then you blast it down the pipe in a jet of water so that it squeegees the sides clean of algae and scale.

Taprogge balls are meant to be captured at the end of the cleaning process, but some escape to the sea. You can tell how old they are by their colour: the biggest, brighter balls are new; the smallest dark blue balls have been rolling around the ocean floor for years, slowly disintegrating but never disappearing. Disappointingly, at Saltburn the Saturday before last, the collectors retrieved a bagful of bright blue, brand new Taprogge balls which suggests someone on Teesside is, even as we speak, not being as careful and as caring as they should be.

Not all we found was human waste. With our eyes now focussed we found a true piece of a trivia – a northern cowrie shell, the size of a fingernail, covered in tiny ridges, as perfect as porcelain, once the home of a trivia arctica, a common sea snail.

This piece of natural waste was, quite literally, just a drop in the ocean of human waste. The shell, though, will break down into harmless grains of sand, but plastic is perennial.

The next beach litterpick, organised by Keeping it Clean at Saltburn, starts at 11am from the shelter by the mini-golf on March 3.