We were back at Wexham Park Hospital this evening helping to tackle the littering problem around the hospital grounds. We’ve being doing these tasks here for nearly 4 years and although the 2 lockdown years gave the grounds some level of respite from the dumped litter, it is now sadly back to ‘normal’ levels.

So 4 of us headed to the hospital after meeting up at Shaggy Calf Lane for our task brief and warm up. With our pickers in hand we headed up the road for the 1km run/walk to the task venue. We met Abdul and Pam at the hospital.

Trail n error

We followed the same route around the grounds as last time and were very pleased that there levels of litter were dramatically less than last time!

Did you know Wexham had a Nature/Trim trail? Neither did we!

We followed the route and cleared the litter as best we could.

• Hiding in the brambles were plenty of masks;

• Bucket loads of ciggie butts;

• Polluting Plastic bottles;

• Mashed up coffee cups;

• Hidden in the deep dark depths were wrappers of crisps sweets and chocolates.

A few litter facts about litter

• More than 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded globally each year. No matter where you are, you’re never far from a cigarette butt. Smoking-related litter is among the most common litter found on our streets;

• Nobody is above the law when it comes to litter. A man in Singapore was fined a massive $15,000 for throwing a cigarette butt out of his apartment window. Even NASA once got a fine, when parts of one of their space stations fell to earth. They had to pay a $400 penalty to authorities in Australia, where the debris landed;

• Maybe you think discarding fruit peel isn’t a problem? Well this counts as littering too, and it actually can take up to 2 years for a banana skin to fully decompose;

• The rat population has increased to 60 million due to the increasing amounts of litter;

• The amount of litter dropped each year in the UK has increased by a massive 500% since the 1960s.

Thanks for getting involved today. We cleared 4 bags of rubbish in 45 mins! Not bad for a Monday night.

Next week we are at the allotments on Stoke Rd. Hope to see you there.