Wales is home to many stunning beaches, and a recent survey has named four of them in its list of cleanest in the UK and Ireland.
The four named in the top ten were: Barafundle Bay, Pembrokeshire (second); Mwnt Beach, Ceredigion, was in third; Marloes Sands, Pembrokeshire, in fourth; Rhossili Bay, Swansea, came in at number eight.
The data was gathered by Ocean Bottle and compiled the rankings after analysing levels of bacteria levels in each waterway. Ocean Bottle are responsible for protecting our oceans and rivers, and have funded the collection of 6 million kgs of ocean-bound plastic to date.
The investigation took into account samples from over 800 waterways across the UK, looking at the average water quality across each corresponding year, including the E.coli and intestinal Enterococci count, to determine the cleanliness of the water. Each location was then analysed on Google ratings and reviews, and no location was considered with less than 100 Google reviews.
The analysis of each location took into account water score, water rating, as well as the number of reviews of each site. Barafundle Bay, the best of the Welsh beaches came second to Keem in County Mayo, Ireland, received a water score of 20 and rating of 4.9 from 1,414 reviews.
Mwnt Beach and Marloes Sands received the same scores as Barafundle Bay, however, received fewer total reviews, receiving 655 and 324 reviews respectively. Similarly, Rhossili Bay also received identical scores as the other named beaches but only received 174 reviews.
At Regimental Cleaning Services, we are also hoping to help take responsibility for keeping our local and natural areas clean and tidy. We launched our Clean is Green campaign to put the business community at the heart of the issue. We hope to help tackle the problem at source by dedicating staff to litter pick in their downtime, while also raising awareness of the issue in the hope that other companies will follow suit.
Read about our latest clean up at the River Thaw, here.