Volunteers collected more than 200kgs of waste, including 70kgs of plastic, along an eight mile stretch of Suffolk rivers during litter picks.

Teams from conservation organisation River Waveney Trust and local businesses removed rubbish from the rivers Waveney and Blyth as part of the Preventing Plastic Pollution initiative.

READ MORE: River Waveney among popular wild swimming sites to be monitored

The project also aims to gather data about what was collected and find ways to reduce these forms of pollution.

East Anglian Daily Times: Volunteers with some of the rubbish collected along the riversVolunteers with some of the rubbish collected along the rivers (Image: River Waveney Trust)

Supported by dedicated volunteers and other local organisations 15 data-gathering litter picks were carried out between Diss and Beccles and one in Halesworth on the River Blyth.

Angela Lamb, the trust's volunteer and events coordinator, said: “Plastic pollution is a massive global problem and what we do locally matters.

READ MORE: 'Incredible turnout' as protesters demand River Waveney clean up

"Whether it’s in our rivers or oceans, plastic litter poses a danger to wildlife, which can get entangled in it or they mistake it for food, but both can lead to poor health and premature death."

East Anglian Daily Times: Volunteers during their litter pickVolunteers during their litter pick (Image: River Waveney Trust)

She said 80% of the plastic in oceans had arrived there via rivers.

"So, we want to tackle that, we want to prevent the big bits of plastic getting into rivers before they breakdown into microplastics which are harder to deal with,” she added.

READ MORE: Beccles news 

In Halesworth, ten volunteers from Spectra Packaging collected 20kgs of litter from the river Blyth and its banks.

Items included a welly, traffic cone, shoes, toys, vapes and lots more, but most of the litter was food and drink related items, with 200 plastic food wrappers and drinks bottles being collected.

READ MORE: Halesworth news

Angela added: “These single use plastic items are what we find most frequently along the river.

“We would love to see a deposit return scheme rolled out across the whole of the UK, where people would get money back when they returned bottles and cans, it would go a long way to reducing the problem we have with litter in our countryside.”