We teamed up with the wonderful staff from Willians LLP solicitors to clean Cheltenham town centre. Cheltenham is a very pretty town with lots of people working and visiting the shops, and green spaces. We wanted to work together to make this beautiful town a bit cleaner than how we found it.
Willans LLP has been a part of Gloucestershire for 75 years, and they regularly support local charities, investing back into their local community. When Willans approached us about a litter pick, we were more than happy to work together! You can read more about the good work Willans do here.
13 volunteers gave their Saturday to help make their local area tidier by litter picking. We began outside Willians LLP office and headed through the streets, focusing on areas where people walk from the station to the racecourse.
Unlike a beach clean we didn’t have to worry about waves and sand; however we did have to handle rain and windy conditions. Over the space of two hours, we litter picked 23 bags of rubbish between us, almost two full bags per person, a great achievement!
Lots of rubbish was stuck inside hedges so this meant an awful lot of clambering into the bushes to get to the litter. Volunteers really got stuck in, going head first into the hedges!
As we travelled through the town, there were limited amounts of rubbish, however when we got closer to the supermarket the amount of litter rose sharply. Lots of food-to-go packaging was found, along with drinks containers.
Some of the things we found most prevalently were glass bottles and drinks cans. We also found mountains of cigarette butts everywhere we looked, and lots of plastic bags caught in foliage.
Some of the more unusual things we found included:
- A plastic gingerbread man
- A rugby ball
- Full bottles of beer
- A metal TV stand, still in its bag
- A roll of wire wedged deep in a hedge
After two hours we headed back to Willian’s offices to weigh what we had collected and chat about the things we had found. Almost everyone was shocked at how much litter there was in their town, and all the volunteers agreed that the clean had made them much more litter aware than they had been before.
We collected 67.91 kilos of rubbish, upping our running total for the year to 195.65 kilos!
If you would like to sign up your team, class, business, or group for a clean please contact us at hello@lifesabeach.org , we’d love to hear from you!
