Beryl's Tradepark Litter Picking
Each year I have some environmental aim and for 2023 it is to do a litter pick in the wood once a month. I keep a record of time spent on collection, sorting and cleaning glass bottles/tins/plastic bottles before recycling. Other examples of year aims have been: reduce vehicle mileage, buy no clothes year, eat something every day that I have grown or foraged. When you do something for a year you tend to continue the trend afterwards.
Litter has always annoyed me. I know that in some urban areas children were taught by their grand-parents to drop litter into the street, as it created jobs! As a teacher I was fighting this within Greater Manchester and a friend had the same problem in Merseyside. This was in the 1970's but was a throw-back to the high unemployment some decades earlier. We are still fighting this as it is passed down the generations.
Being brought up by parents who had had a rough time of it in the 1930's I was always taught how to re-use, repair and re-purpose, doing things at the least cost. From a father who straightened used bent nails to re-use, to a mother who made my coats from her old ones, you soon learnt not to waste anything. Waste food was unheard of and I still cannot get my head around how much food is wasted by some people these days. A great love of the environment too, from animals to plants, with interests in outdoor sports and gardening are in my DNA. All of this fits with the ethos of Green Hive and I was drawn to the organisation when it started. I hope we can instil some of these ideas into the community, and encourage people to acquire some of the skills our parents had, we will all reap the benefit.
Photo Credit: Alex Williamson
September Update
Five days after my big clean-up round the logs I went to investigate and found 27 items of litter, as on photo. This I collected and since then I have just done 3 mini-picks to the logs and locally. As the temperature dropped the litter decreased around the logs but not on the paths. The second photo is of the recycling collected this month, during the mini-picks, which has now been cleaned and deposited.
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