Rose at the Zurich Museum of Design with the amount of debris that enters our seas every 15 seconds (picture: paulrose.org)

More than 500 people are expected to gather at Lake Windermere this Saturday (2 March) as part of the ‘world’s biggest’ freshwater litter-collecting ‘debris dive’.

A combination of registered divers and shore-based volunteers will collect litter that has ‘blown, fallen or been thrown’ into Lake Windermere in the hopes of dredging up to ten tonnes of litter during the 11-hour event.

The mass clean-up operation has been organised by Paul Rose, Vice President of the Royal Geographical Society and Patron of the Friends of the Lake District, and will see organisations including the National Trust, Lake District National Park, Impact International and Kendal and Lakes Sub-Aqua Club come together to help clean up the lake.

Rose explained that he had organised the event to highlight the global problem of litter polluting the world’s waterways.

He said: “The amount of debris entering our seas is so vast that it’s practically immeasurable. And as our oceans are the largest, least understood and least protected ecosystem on the planet, it can be difficult to grasp the problem.

“By debris-diving inland lakes and then producing beautiful works of art from the rubbish I surprise and engage large audiences in the ocean debris issue.

“When we look at the rubbish collected from my lake dives it's easy to draw parallels with the ocean debris as it brings things into a smaller scale.”

Referring to Saturday's lake dive, Rose told The Westmorland Gazettethat twelve divers had been to the lake in November last year and “got one big van load of rubbish, probably about a tonne or so” and that he was therefore expecting from this dive to bring up ”between five and 10 tonnes, although it may well be even more than that”.

“If all that was piled up on the fells people would be outraged and they’d want someone arrested for it. But because it’s in the lake people don’t realise how bad it is”, he added.

Rubbish that is pulled out of the lake will be stored by Impact International before being passed on to local schools who will use the litter to create sculptures that will be displayed and auctioned to raise funds for Friends of the Lake District’s conservation work.

The Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn project will also work in partnership with the schools to build the ‘world’s largest’ Merz sculpture (a ‘psychological collage’, which contains fragments of found objects), from the reclaimed items.

The dive follows news from the Guardian, which revealed that litter has been found in the UK’s ‘unexplored’ ocean depths.

Read more about the Lake Windermere ‘debris dive’.