Sorting and counting
Selecting a litter datasheet
There are many ways to group or categorise litter. How litter is grouped will depend on the research questions.
Having a litter datasheet that helps you identify problem items (most frequently littered items) and where they are coming from (sources) is therefore very important to address the issues.
No litter datasheet can include every example of litter that may be found at a site. Such a datasheet would be infinitely long!
The most useful datasheets are ones that:
- collect data that will answer your research questions, and
- are easy to complete.
Important note:
Litter items should be counted and weighed per zone (i.e., wet and dry zone) and per day for accumulation surveys. Each day of the survey should thus have two weight and two count estimates, one for the dry zone and one for the wet zone.
Two different datasheets are available for use in this course – a Basic Litter Datasheet (35 litter types) and a Comprehensive Litter Datasheet (>140 litter types). The datasheet you use (and thus how you sort your litter) will depend on what you are hoping to learn from your beach surveys. We designed these datasheets to help answer a range of research questions, to be comparable to other litter datasheets, and to be easy to use.
Click below for information on how to complete each datasheet