

The once-pristine sands of South China’s Silver Beach, located in Beihai, Guangxi province and once dubbed ‘the number one beach in the world’, are now littered with plastic bottles, condom wrappers and mounds of trash, becoming an eyesore to the 3.5 million tourists who visit every year.

According to the Telegraph, the beach has been blanketed with so much debris, “the squads of cleaners who patrol it say that there is sometimes no area of clean sand large enough for people to lie down.”

Xinhua reported earlier this year that the beach was littered with around 60 tons of trash and has become another location victim to China’s out-of-hand pollution crisis.

“Silver Beach might have been the number one beach in the world in the 1980s but it isn’t any more,” a local reporter said. “The sands have changed.”

[Image credit: @linh.ngan]



