Litter Picking - Daisy Barker -19/01/2021
Dropping litter is a serious crime, to the law and to the environment. Not only could you be fined a lot of money (up to £80 and if you don’t pay that it could be thousands) it also hurts the environment, badly. Wildlife suffers immensely from littering and fly tipping in their habitats. Plastics and other non biodegradable substances, plus things that take along time to biodegrade like cigarettes (which take about 8 years-Zero Waste Scotland), are the main cause of this disruption since they will never go back into the cycle of nature or will take a very long time. The average cost per household for keeping the streets clean after littering is around £28-Litter and littering in England 2017 to 2018, and litter pickers are doing a lot to help too. In Scotland, litter-pickers now collect an average of 1,963 pieces of litter per kilometre - Zero Waste Scotland.
So what can you do to help?
You could go on a litter pick with a group of people who hold litter picking sessions in your area, you could invite friends to your local park to litter pick, you could do it with your family or on your own! I chose to litter pick with my mum in the area behind my garden, which was really covered in rubbish that people throw down from a small residential car park. To start I got my litter picker and bags, one recycling and one bin bag - how hopeful! I started by picking up individual bits of rubbish with the litter picker but it was a bit time consuming so I switched to oversized gardener’s gloves over normal gloves which was both warm and relatively dry and that enabled me to pick up multiple bits of rubbish at the same time and also to do a bit of rummaging under the ivy. We found that we had 2 traffic cones that people had chucked there! So then we had two cones and we hung the bags on them. We found a few bugs that were living in the rubbish we picked up that we put back into nature and it fills me with hope that they will have a free life in the wild now!
We found a lot of things that could have been recycled, like plastic bottles and metal cans so 1. Be careful of rusty cans or broken glass, 2. Cover up any broken glass and de-risk things that could hurt wildlife further down the line (like if what you put in the bin gets thrown into the sea for example, cut up 6 pack can holders) 3. Most of what you find being littered could be recycled and worth money that could be used to save the planet and 4. If you can, then do separate what you find into what can and can’t be recycled, oh and also 5. If something that could be recycled is really muddy then you can either clean it or put it in the bin bag so that better recyclable things can be recycled. Among the bits of boring rubbish we actually found some really cool things, we found a pair of flip flops, two tennis balls, a hippo toy, a paint roller, roller tray and paintbrush!? A car engine, an unopened packet of popcorn, two and a half ceramic bowls, “a worm”, an empty toolbox, two small baskets and a bigger basket and a very cool thing plus lots more. So it was very well worth it just for the treasures I found, plus I did my bit to help the environment. I think we did a pretty good job <3. In total it took me two and a half days and we filled five bags; two recycling and three bin bags.
If you want to see the full video it’s on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsBr3CD-EKs&t=304s