Sunny Sunday Morning

This morning we decided to start our pick from a place we had started from before but this time go off in a different direction. We parked at the park and ride at Silk Mills just outside Taunton. It was quite hot and muggy with the sun regularly breaking through the sometimes heavy clouds.

Our rough route plan was to head up over the railway bridge and out towards Staplegrove.

The first half a kilometre was pretty much to the top of the bridge and there was so much rubbish quite a lot of it just over the fence by the side of the road – obviously either thrown directly from car windows or blown into the hedge. We had half filled both the litter bag and the recycling bag in this first half a km.

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Dad tried to come up with some top quality video content following the litter from ground to bag – not sure it went very well!

The most frustrating spot was by a small bench on a path opposite the Co-op at Staplegrove. Right next to this bench was a bin and yet we found 5 or 6 bottles just discarded in the undergrowth. There was also lots of litter right next to the bin. I guess the bin may have been full when people tried to put their litter in it – but if the bin is full don’t put any more in! The bottles though just looked to have been thrown away without a thought.

Some of the smaller bits of litter can be quite tricky to spot - you only get the merest glimpse of alien colour in amongst the natural environment.

While we picked along the main road we met the man who Ben and Dad met at the tip last week – he stopped to say hello as he passed by.

We’ve noticed that the cup tops that you get with McDonalds (and others) take away drinks are really fragile and seem to splinter when they have been left out in the wild for a while– one cup lid can easily become many many little pieces of plastic – we have to be a bit more careful when we pick those up.

We headed back down through the park next to Staplegrove school and then back to the car.

We were out for about 1 hr 50 today, covering 4.5 km and picking up 2.51kg of rubbish and 6.59kg of recycling.