Meeting some friends and lots more clean-ups

It’s been a while since I last posted, however, given the rather samey nature of the clean-ups I feel that doing updates every few weeks should keep my writing (and your reading) as interesting and punchy as possible. As you can imagine, we’ve got a pretty good system going by now and our clean-ups usually follow a similar routine. First I load the car with as many garden bags and plastic bins as I can and then we set off along the particularly litter-filled route we’ve chosen. Often if we don’t have a particular verge or lay-by in mind, we’ll just patrol the lanes and head out to the main roads, where you’re guaranteed to always find a decent smattering of plastic. Several clean lay-bys and a decent amount of roadside-plodding later all of our bins will be full and we’ll head to the recycling centre. Now we use open plastic bins, rather than bin bags, its far easier to pre-sort the recyclables meaning we can head straight to the tip on our way home.

Both an encouraging sign that Spring is on its way but also an ugly reminder of how our litter can ruin the beauty of such moments.

Our cleans over the past few weeks have proven relatively eventful – although that is in comparison to our otherwise extremely exhilarating lives at present! For starters we’ve experienced all manner of weather; battling snow, rain, wind and even a few glimpses of watery winter sunshine here-and-there! Our clean-up on the 2nd of February proved particularly exciting though, as we actually made some litter-picking friends! As we were making our way into Chard, having just been cleaning several lay-bys in Broadwindsor and Hinton St George, I saw the distinctive and tale-tale combination of high vis and several wavering sticks rooting around in the hedgerow. Excited by the prospect we were not alone in our quest to clean-up the countryside we stopped and a chatted with the blokes who work as litter-pickers for Somerset council. Other than the exchange of much shared anti-litter frustration, we also learnt that they had just stolen the long litter-filled verge into Chard that we were just heading to clean – although if its going to be one of us I’d rather them! They told us that they had just spent the morning along this section, managing to clear a staggering 30 bin bags. When we hopped back in the car to warm up I initially felt defeated: these guys spend their working days picking up litter all over Somerset, yet there is still so much of it lurking along our roadsides – it shows just how vast this issue really is. However, upon reflection, our encounter with them did actually make me more hopeful than not, reminding me how plenty of other people (although arguably not enough!) are also on a similar quest to reduce the amount of litter across our country!

Some new friends! I think they thought we were slightly insane, getting that excited over their presence, but I guess lockdown is taking it toll and so any opportunity to speak to new people is exciting in itself!!

Overall, I think over the course of the past 2 or 3 weeks I’ve been out around 5 times and have emptied 3 car loads full of rubbish – equating to around 21 black bin bags (its hard to be exact as we no longer use plastic bin bags).