A video has emerged showing the extent of the pollution left by New Year's Eve fireworks on a beach in China.

The footage from January 1 showed debris from used fireworks stretching away into the distance, with initially no cleanup crews removing it.

It seems that debris from further down has already been washed out to sea as the sand is clear, but further up the tide line, thousands of used fireworks batteries and exploding rockets are lying on the sand.

Council workers later scrambled to remove the trash from the Pinghai Vanke Shuangyue Bay Beach in Huizhou, Guangdong.

According to locals, the fireworks had been released starting around 7pm and continued until 3am.

Angry residents said that the people who set off the fireworks should have cleared their rubbish away afterwards, although with many of the batteries still burning, this would have been difficult.

A local hotel said that the problem was caused by people who decided to set off fireworks outside of the designated area.

Local government officials confirmed that the video was true and said it was impossible to stop such a large number of people from turning up around the same time along what was effectively around 3 km of beach to release fireworks.

He added that 30 people had been hired to clean up the beach but that it was not enough to get it done quickly.