Litter picking is a funny thing. While I feel I am certainly making a genuine impact on reducing the amount of rubbish scattered across our landscape, the sheer number of plastic bin bags we’ve been getting through on these clean-ups seems slightly paradoxical to my plastic-free mission. Even if our work is going to a good cause, we are still contributing to this growing problem of plastic and simply adding to those mountains of landfill and fuelling consumer demand for single-use, plastic products.
Fortunately Daddy had a cunning solution to this issue and presented me with several large garden bags (used for leaves, twigs etc), suggesting we trial using these instead of the bin bags. I’m glad to say after our picking today this new zero-waste system works perfectly well- if not better- than our one before! Our new method now is to collect our litter in smaller, reusable bags and then empty these into one of the gigantic garden waste bags sitting patiently in the boot of our Landie. It’s really efficient for our litter-sorting too, as unlike the plastic bags we are able to dive straight into the big one at the dump to sort out the recyclables, glass, plastics etc. – rather than having to open up each small bin-bag carefully so not to rip it.
On the left you can see the smaller bags we now use when collecting, and then larger ones on the right we use when sorting it all out at the recycling centre. Both are pretty sturdy material so we’ll be able to reuse them hundreds of times!
The only drawback to our new bagging system is that it’s harder to convey to you visually how much litter we are really collecting. While bin bags are a pretty standard and understandable size, the volume of these large garden-waste bags we are now using is both hard to gauge but also deceivingly larger than it looks. Nevertheless over these last 3 clean-ups I reckon the equivalent of around 15 bin bags have been collected, sorted and recycled (where possible!!)
Since my last post I’ve done 3 other big clean-ups; one was between Birdsmoorgate and Marshwood, the other around Morcombelake and Charmouth and most recently between Beaminster and Bridport. Usually on cleans like these we’ll drive along the chosen route, looking out for any lay bys or grassy verges which need a bit of TLC, cleaning up the area as we go along.
Forget about our new zero-waste collection methods though, as the real excitement recently has been the introduction of our new litter picker (or the Litter Picker Pro 200 to be precise) to our campaign. And yes, our lives really are that dull!! Apart from completing our community service look (which we reckon most motorists think we are conducting) it is actually a really handy tool and particularly good for grabbing anything lurking in undergrowth or brambles.
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