27 awesome runners ran 4km to clean up in Greenwich!

It was a doubly whammy last night, National Volunteers Week and Global Running Day and what better way to celebrate than a GoodGym group run!!

We had a whopping 8 new runners join us last night, so big welcome to James, Daniel, Natalie, Matthew, Judith, Robert, Anna & Dave!

Sadly our task was cancelled yesterday but it didn't stop us from doing a whole lotta good! Armed with bin bags and gloves, we split off into 3 groups to hit has many parts of Greenwich as possible! Vickie's group headed east, Ben's group went up the hill and south, and my lovely lot got a little tour of western Greenwich!

Even though the streets of Greenwich are litter picked on a daily basis, it still astounds me the amount that is on the streets. Who are these litter droppers anyway?!?!! That's what I wanna know. There are SO many bins around Greenwich, there is no excuse!

So many butts!

And no I don't mean booties, I mean cigarette butts! Loads of them just lining the curbside, it was quite gross. And you see people dropping them all the time, like it doesn't count as littering or something!

Another thing that was apparent was the amount of single-use plastic, which has been in the news a lot recently since that Planet Earth episode. So many coffee cup lids, plastic bottles, straws, plastic bags, the list goes on! But hopefully last night has inspired you to bring your own coffee cup to get your coffee today, or take your own bag to the supermarket or say no to that straw in your drink... it's the little things that make a difference!

We spent just over half an hour tidying up and then brought our hoard back to the Cutty Sark to then dispose of it in the correct way! The recycling bags in the big blue bins (hopefully the residents didn't mind!) and the black bags in the regular bins. We must have collected at least 20 bags of stuff?? Some weren't full to the brim (Ben's team I'm looking at you!) but still a decent effort all round!

And then it was finally time to take that lovely sweaty glove off to reveal a nice wrinkly granny hand!

We headed back to the uni for a stretch and called it a night!

Great job everyone! Hopefully you still felt a sense of achievement even though our task was cancelled! It was an amazing effort all round so well done! I'm sure our mayor will be proud when I tweet her! See you next time!