We have teamed up again with our corporate partner ProCook to keep our local area clean. Life’s a Beach and ProCook have moved into a new eco-friendly office; so to celebrate our move, as well as B Corp month, we decided to hold a litter pick in our surrounding area.
With lots of construction traffic, and being very close to a motorway, the roads surrounding our new building had a fair amount of litter. 10 volunteers from ProCook and Life’s a Beach gave up their lunch break in order to tackle the roadside rubbish.
Given that the new ProCook office is on the site of a former airfield, it was extremely windy. We had one volunteer battle against the wind whilst holding a large sheet of hard black plastic that was three foot across. Despite the wind, bag after bag was filled. We had to stop and make piles of filled bags along our route that we then loaded into the Life’s a Beach car.
We were interested to see if the amount, or type of litter, would be different here compared to our normal beach cleans. While the amount of litter was concentrated over a smaller area, the type of things we found were very similar. Bottles, polystyrene, cans, plastic bags, wet wipes, and plastic gloves are things we find on every clean. However we did find some items that we haven’t come across on the beach yet, for example hub caps, a mattress, many fast food wrappers, and lots of shrink wrap.
An impressive 15 full sacks of waste were collected in just an hour. Some of the more interesting things we found included:
- In excess of 15-20 vodka bottles along with security tags.
- Hub caps
- A single mattress
- A damaged road sign
- A cookbook
- A large bolt
- Large plastic sheeting
We found a bag of security tags; when combined with the staggering number of empty vodka bottles, we wondered if perhaps the bottles had been stolen and the plastic and glass waste had then been thrown out on the side of the road, where we later found it.
We also found this cookbook mostly buried in the fallen leaves. It is definitely one of the more unusual items we have found during our clean events!
Together we collected an impressive 68.69 kilos of waste! This takes our total this year to 127.74 kilos cleaned across our events this year!
Thank you to all the volunteers from ProCook who gave up their lunch break to make such a positive impact on their local area. We can’t wait for our next event together.
We are passionate about helping our local area, and this is just another way in which we are helping keep Gloucester clean. It is our plan to hold many more clean event within Gloucestershire to work in tandem with our Waste Less schools’ initiative, this year.
If you are your team would like to take part in a clean to tidy up your local area, please contact us via hello@lifesabeach.org we would love to hear from you.
