We ran a lunch time litter pick with our long-term charity partner ProCook in March. The event, while only a hour long, was a huge success with almost 70 kilos of litter being collected.
Following the success of this event we decided to repeat the event with another lunchtime clean with volunteers from the ProCook head office staff.
Eight volunteers gave up their lunch break to litter pick in the immediate area surrounding the new head office building. There are several businesses based in this industrial estate, and litter from these business can end up accidentally blowing across the park. There was far less litter present than during our previous clean, but we still managed to fill our bags.
Volunteers worked together to collect the wayward litter whilst also enjoying the sunshine. We focused on the pedestrian paths as well as the side of the main road, and were surprised by how much litter we found. Predominantly, we found discarded food packaging. These are very lightweight, and while they hardly registered when we weigh what we have collected, packaging like this filled a large portion of our bin bags. These thin plastic wrappers are easily taken by the wind and blown out of overfull bins.
This differed from the mostly glass bottles and hub caps we found during our previous cleans.
Some of the more notable things we found included:
- A sock
- A buried glove
- Lots of black wire
- Thin plastic sheeting caught in many brushes and trees.
Clear plastic sheets had wrapped itself around trees, bushes, and shrubs. We had to detangle some of the more embedded pieces by hand rather than using the pickers. It had clearly been blown into the greenery, and was difficult to remove.
Since our last clean here, almost two months ago, the grass and flowers had grown significantly. While pretty, this made is far harder to spot the litter amongst the long grass. Using our pickers we had to dig items out from underneath dirt and grass.
There were also several small ponds on our route, and litter had blown down and become caught there. Some of our brave volunteers carefully went down the slopes to clear the rubbish away. We felt compelled to go down and retrieve the plastic when we saw ducks on the water and became concerned they might be harmed by the floating rubbish.
After less than 60 minutes, a total of 8 bags weighing in at 14.52 kilos were collected! This cleans brings out total for the year to 293.74 kilos of litter collected!
Thank you to the wonderful volunteers who gave up their time, and thank you to ProCook for continuing to be such a dedicated and passionate charity partner.
We will be holding another lunchtime clean event in September as part of our joint dedication to keeping our local area of Gloucester free from litter.
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.
