Hello Yeovil!

Today marked a full year of litter picking - we started on Saturday 26th Feb 2022 with a long walk around Trull and Comeytrowe in Taunton, since then we have averaged 1 every 2 weeks – although there have been some periods of every weekend and the occasional once a month. Our original aim was to just do a year but we are going to carry on picking at least until a few weeks before I go on my trip.

For today’s pick we had looked at Minehead, Bridgwater or Yeovil as our location. We settled on Yeovil – Dad’s company have offices there where we could park and we thought we’d save Minehead for a warmer day.

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And if you’d like too see where we have been in map form you can find all our picks here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit...

It was quite bright when we left and we both got in the car agreeing that we wouldn’t need coats – when we got out of the car though at the other end it did feel a bit colder and I think we both regretted not bringing something a bit warmer.

We were stuck in traffic lights for quite a while on the way to our start and played Peek-A-Boo with a little girl in the car next to us – she showed us her orange spring so we showed her some random lego bricks we have got in our car. We then all waved goodbye as we went round the roundabout!

We parked outside my Dad’s company and began our pick from there – our plan was to do a looped walk down through Ninesprings park and then back along the road.

We found some rubbish as soon as we got outside where we parked - it was between some bench like plant dividers where there are some plants\gravel – I think this was mostly blown by the wind although there was also someones shirt which can’t have blown there.

We then walked along a little way and started to follow the path up to Ninesprings. On this first bit there was a load of litter. Lots and lots of cans, several bottles both glass and plastic, several bagged dog poos.

We could see some rubbish stuck in the stream but we couldn’t quite reach this. We had quite a lot before we even reached the proper start of Ninesprings. Some of this was deep in the undergrowth down near the fence next to the river/stream – quite difficult to get to.

Once we got into Ninesprings itself the amount of rubbish dropped off – it seemed to be much better cared for than the entrance pathway – either people are more careful in the park or someone is looking after it. There was still the odd bit of rubbish but this was more just the top corner of sweet packets or the occasional bottle top.

Once we exited Ninesprings and followed the path up to the road – the rubbish started to build up again. On either side of the path are some grassy\planty bits and these seemed to catch a bit of litter. We found about 4 unbagged dog poos here (I’m sorry but Dad insisted on photographing several of them) making 5 in total on this walk. It isn’t great as there were little kids cycling and running along here and it wouldn’t take much for them to go off path and end up in one. One of the poos was no more than a couple of metres from a dog poo bin!

The saddest thing we picked looked to be someones troubles. They had written a lot of life problems on a plate and then it looks like they smashed it – Dad says he can see that being suggested as some sort of a way of identifying your problems and then psychologically throwing them away – something like that anyway – it would have been better if they had smashed it somewhere else though!

When we got to the Lysander Road at the other end of Ninesprings we turned right and headed back to our start. However this road was filthy. There are supermarkets, fast food places, a Bradfords building supplies and a B&M store along the road as well as road works and traffic lights and the road suffers as a result. We found about 10 empty bottles of lager at the exit to B&M – I think this may have been fly-tipping as there was a larger item in the hedge which we could not quite get. There was a lot of fast food rubbish, McFlurry pots, juice pots, bottles of water, paper cups etc all the way along.

Our bags were getting quite full and heavy now and we were thinking we should probably stop and go and get the car – then we came to a shortcut to the entrance of B&M. There was a hedge which was just teeming with rubbish – it was horrible. There was so much in there I am not sure my photo shows properly how much there was. We stood there and thought that it was going to take too long to do and we may have to leave it. We didn’t have much room left in our bags. But we then thought we may as well try so we opened another bag and started to clean it up. It took a little while but we eventually got it to looking something like clean. B&M had a lot of rubbish at both the entrance and exits to their land and I think they should probably be doing a bit more to clean it up – it might not be their rubbish but it makes their shop and car park look really bad.

We carried on a little further to the Bradfords entrance – Dad cleared up a small pile near the entrance but we then thought we should probably call it a day. We had been out for about 1hour and 48 minutes and the bags were really heavy. So I sat and looked after our collection while Dad went back to get the car. We had only walked about 3KM in those 2 hours but when we weighed the bags as we put them into the car we found that we had

Recycling: 9.31kg Rubbish: 7.03kg

It was no wonder that our arms were getting tired.

This was our 27th pick – we had wondered at the start if we were going to break through the 200kg mark for littler collected in total – and we did that by some distance.

Our overall stats now are Picks: 27 Rubbish: 214.32 kg Distance: 133.98 km

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