SPRING CLEAN TIME

28^th March 2019 and our planned Spring Clean in Mayow Park arrived. We were taking part in the annual one-month-long national campaign organised by the charity Keep Britain Tidy.   https://www.keepbritaintidy.org/

This community-led event aims to clean up litter from our streets, parks and beaches. In particular, we are all aware of the huge amount of publicity about single-use plastic, how it harms wildlife and makes an area feel unloved. For our event, our focus was only on Mayow Park.

Today’s event included our local Safer Neighbourhood team of police,  our park keeper and one of his colleagues, five pupils from year three of Our Lady and St Philip Neri primary school with their class teacher Mrs Moss as well as FOMP (Friends of Mayow Park) volunteers and a very well-behaved dog. The children met the police and held their litter picking sticks high to show they were keen to get to work.

Children with their litter sticks at the ready 

Our park-keeper spends just two days a week in our park but in those two days he can’t go into all the wooded areas of the park to clear up tiny pieces of plastic and dumped items. Today’s event was also aimed at helping him.

spreading out to seek out litter

Armed with our litter picks and big bin bags we all headed off .

The wooded space parallel to Mayow Road was full of rubbish including empty fast food containers, bottles, cans and general rubbish. Some of the spring-clean team stayed there for most of the morning, removing as much as they could.

into the woods

Others went into wooded areas around the park perimeter and along the meadow.

The children and their teacher did their pick-up mainly in the open spaces, which at first glance appeared relatively litter-free. Yet they managed to fill TWO large bin bags with rubbish. The children commented on how many Haribo sweet wrappers and empty packets they found. They had to leave us after roughly 45 minutes and return to school. Their help was invaluable.

When we all gathered together at the end of the clean-up we were surprised to see we had filled 15 bin bags with rubbish but we had not been able to recycle anything as most recyclables were ‘contaminated’,  meaning too dirty to put into recycling bins. The police, with their equipment, had also found two large knives which had been discarded in the woodland running alongside Mayow Road.

Not buried treasure!

Some of those involved in our event & bags of rubbish

Thank you to everyone who joined in today. The general feeling was that we had achieved much, collected a lot of rubbish and helped to clean up our much-loved park. At the same time it raised the question of why some people seem to feel it is OK to drop litter.

We are aiming to take part in the National Spring Clean again next year.