This weekend saw the Green Centre crew getting down and dirty with the litter-pickers, on Well Road Hill, reports Cat Turner from Isle of Man Friends of the Earth
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Each year, the good folks at Douglas Borough Corporation organise a ‘Big Tidy Up’ event.
This is where members of the public can help rekindle their pride in the town, and clean up specially grotty grot-spots.
The corporation provides fetching tabards (see our photo for how to carry them off with aplomb), bin bags and longhandled litterpickers for picking up the yukkier items.
Well Road Hill provides us with a fertile area for litterpicking, it must be said, chock-a-block with binnable stuff.
The team spent a productive hour or so making the place presentable, and getting some exercise into the bargain.
Organised across the British Isles by Keep Britain Tidy, the Big Tidy Up has been going on annually since 2008, and last year more than 30,000 people got involved, hefting a massive 4,056 bags of rubbish off our streets and public spaces.
Since its inception, it’s actually removed 25,000 sacks of refuse – and that’s a great result.
It does make you wonder, though, doesn’t it....why do people think it’s OK to litter the streets of their hometowns so that the Big Tidy Up is necessary?
Much of what we collected was cigarette butts, chewing gum and drinks bottles/cans – all, sadly, discarded on the pavement within metres of easily-accessible bins.
Littering’s an offence that can be punished by a hefty fine – so why not make that extra effort and walk the few feet to the nearest rubbish receptacle?
In any event, it greatly restored my faith in human nature, when a lovely lady dropped into the Green Centre later that same day, to buy one of our neat ‘pocket ashtrays’ – tidy little things that mean she’ll never be at a loss for somewhere to dispose of her smokes.
And every little really does help: my girls have developed a little ‘house rule’, that we try to leave places better than we found them.
Usually, that means collecting a few bits of rubbish and sticking them in a nearby bin, or bringing them home to our own wheelie-bin.
Lizzie, aged 10, tells me that to her mind it’s about ‘showing respect for the people who live here’, including – of course – ourselves.
I like her approach – we’ll keep our island tidy, because we’re worth it!