A British surfer is surrounded by a sea of plastic rubbish as she paddles on her surfboard in Bali on March 10 in a heartbreaking scene.

Rebecca Gilmore was shocked when she went out to surf in the seas surrounding the dream destination of Bali to discover the sea was filled with plastic, describing it as like "surfing in a plastic soup."

The footage, filmed out at sea, shows Gilmore, who is from the Wirral, collecting by hand the plastic rubbish that is floating around her instead of actually surfing.

Gilmore listed the trash that floated around her as she surfed: plastic bags; plastic razors; plastic toothbrushes; plastic bottles; plastic food wrappers (lots of these, she said); plastic straws; plastic flip flops; plastic cups (again, lots of these); plastic sheeting; plastic sweet wrapper; plastic cartons; polystyrene; plastic crisp packets; plastic cutlery; and one glass bottle."

She added: “I had to get out of the ocean, I didn’t want to stay in, the ocean is normally my happy place and I felt so unhappy with the whole experience, this all upset me so much and was hugely overwhelming and heartbreaking,” Gilmore - who works for an environmental charity - told Newsflare.

“There was just so much plastic and I struggled to handle what I was seeing. I had to get off my board a few times because I had something wrapped around my foot or on my leash.”

“Some of the plastic had clearly been floating around in the ocean for a while and had faded and discoloured, I also found a small fish floating in a plastic wrapper and a crab floating on a plastic bag. Totally devastating to find!”

She added: “I don’t think the video even shows the scale of what was actually out there, there was so much floating past me I couldn’t pick it up quick enough. The best way to describe my experience was surfing in a plastic soup, a place of beauty and wonder so easily destroyed by us.”