We hate Fly Tippers!

I didn’t manage a litter pick last weekend - there was too much going on – we had sports clubs on Saturday – my sister played hockey on Saturday (she lost!) I played hockey on Sunday (we lost!) and Dad ran in the Yeovil half marathon also on Sunday. All of which meant we ran out of time.

I have made some signs to put up where we do our picks as I realised that whilst people might see me out they might have no idea what I’m doing. Also people might notice an area I have picked in is cleaner but they might not know why. So now when we do a pick we’ll leave some signs up and then go and get them later in the week.

This week I thought we’d return to the stream that I didn’t finish last time. It took a while to get there as a lot of roads in the area were shut due to the Taunton Marathon.

I remembered to take the fishing nets this time (and Dad remembered his trousers) I also took along my sister for some additional help. The nets were better than just the pickers but Dad had to fashion some extra long reach sticks out of some cable ties and 4 bamboo poles – this helped us reach a lot of bottles and cans that had made their way to the far side of the stream.

There was so much litter again – on the plus side the section we cleaned last time didn’t seem to have any extra litter – there were just the bits we couldn’t reach before.

On the negative side there was so much in the bit of stream that we didn’t get to last time. I still got the usual bottles – glass and plastic – and tin cans and mcdonalds wrappers and drinks cups. But there was also what appeared to either be fly tipping or the results of a van being robbed and the contents dumped. An expensive electricians trolley – some electrical connectors and tools. There were also quite a few car parts – a spoiler, the under side protector , a light, bits of bumper.

There was too much for us to take so we piled it up by the side of the road and notified the council of fly tipping. Hopefully we have helped them a little by getting it out of the stream – although there were some bits we just couldn’t get – a couple of wheels/tyres and a large rectangular “thing” no idea what it was only that it was not gettable with our tools!

Today we got 13.7 KG of recycling (got to love a discarded glass bottle!) and 10.6KG of rubbish.

Plus whatever we couldn't weigh.

A huge amount for such a short piece of river. Strava has recorded the activity as 1.95 Km. But there was a lot of back and forth on that – we didn’t really cover more than 500m probably. Because we were stopped in the same place for so long the time recorded on Strava is wrong - we were actually there about 2 hours - not the 35mins it has recorded!

Hopefully the signs we have left out will make a difference and spread awareness of what I’m doing.

One of our Litter Picker Pro springs broke so I will need to fix that before our next pick.

As ever - if you want to sponsor me you can do so here: https://gofund.me/78d66343

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