Litter Picking Summary 4th + 7th September 2019

With the summer holidays almost over, 11 volunteers met at Bank Square on Wednesday 4th September. We covered all of the town centre, down as far as Sainsbury’s car park, the Leisure Centre, the Station, the Carrs, and the town end of Chapel Lane.  We collected at least 9 bags along with some recyclabes.

One of our volunteers discovered that one of the benches from inside Sainsburys was lying behind the cycle rack. She asked a supervisor why this was and was told, ‘Not our bench’. She checked the bench again that it was theirs – it had a plaque dedicated to a former employee, Harold Jupp. This time, a manager agreed and said it would be brought back inside!

We were pleased to welcome a new volunteer at Wednesday’s pick.

9 volunteers met in Summerfields car park on Saturday 7th September. We focused on the surrounding area including Dean Row Road, the slip road and footpath alongside the A34, Colshaw Drive (starting at both ends but not quite reaching the middle) and Oakenclough Close. We collected 14 bags of litter, a tyre and some recyclables.

There seemed to be less litter than normal on Colshaw Drive. Some of our volunteers were told that the local residents association have been doing their own litter picks and have had equipment donated by CEC so that they can make this a regular event. We are going to try to make contact with them again so that we can liaise and co-ordinate future litter picks.

We found a mattress that had been fly-tipped on the service road by rear entrance to the cemetery. We will be reporting this to ANSA.  A few months ago we made contact with Network Rail to report the litter on the embankments where Dean Row Road crosses over the railway. We checked progress today and unfortunately they have only cleared the easy bit where there are steps down. So – we will report back to them and see if the other 3 embankments can be dealt with.

We collected at least 23 bags of litter at our 2 scheduled September picks along with some more bags collected by our voluneers on solo picks.

Well done everyone – hope to see you in October.