Thornby Pickers

Sparkbrook farm park

A gathering of volunteers who meet in the painted bus shelter in High Bentham at 1pm on 13th of each month. We spend an hour or so litter-picking, weeding, planting or generally clearing up around our market town. We also put pressure on the Town Council or District Council when we come across something that we need to tackle in partnership with a larger, more official body.

Keeping the area litter free and making it a nicer place to live. Parks, Water Parks, Mersey Paths and anywhere else that perhaps is an eyesore and needs some TLC from the local Litter Squad.

I have been litter picking my local area and would love to encourage and help other people to take simular direct action to this blight.

The Beach Wardens at Penarth are all unpaid volunteers who give up some of their free time to help keep Penarth beach free of litter. The group are independent of both the local town council and the county council but all Wardens are members of the Penarth Civic Society, which covers the general administration for the group, negotiates licences and other working relationships with beach owners and local authorities, and pays the necessary insurance premiums.

Lady Bay Litterpickers no longer functions as a group. Instead, individuals are issued with equipment to litterpick an area of Lady Bay of their choice, usually the streets immediately around their home and at times convenient to them. If you would like to be involved in this new style of litterpicking, please get in touch - sian.trafford@ntu.ac.uk . Be assured, however, that our aims are still to keep Lady Bay as one of the best places to live, and to generate pride in our community.

The group was initiated by the Parish Council with the aim of ensuring that our village and its environs are kept neat and tidy and as litterfree as possible. We welcome more helpers at our next litterpick on Saturday 21st March 2009.

Who are we? We are an environmental group undertaking planting in our village, litter picks, promoting reduction in Co2 and smart driving, and working with the local community to make our village a litter free area. We deliver over 1700 newsletters around our village promoting our message and work with Thringstone Primary School and the local brownie group various events, including a scarecrow festival in June 2011 which brought together all sectors of the community . We held another scarecrow event, in conjunction with Thringstone Methodists, on Saturday 6th July 2013. Our chairman litter picks daily, and is helped by others who litter pick regularly. We try, where possible, to recycle items which can be recycled. We petitioned for extra recycling bins in our village and now have two tin and plastic bottle recycling points and a glass recycling point, and are currently asking for the council to consider ways of recycling acceptable items put in roadside litter bins. Between February 2013 and the end of February 2014, we removed 1,958 bags of litter from the village and woodlands, which we feel is a staggering amount. We have also worked with other groups on environmental issues in the village, and were part of the steering group that saw Thringstone Youth Club win the Children and Young People\\\\\\\'s Green Footprints Award in 2011 for their mural project. We have taken over several flowerbeds and previously untidy and unused areas in the village for planting and offer historical and environmental walks around the village. Please see our website which is www.friends-of-thringstone.org.uk for further details on our group, plus details on our constitution, health and safety policy, equal opportunities policy, parental consent statements and volunteer expenses statement. You can also see on that site details of all our publications. What have we done? In 2009 we won the NW Leicestershire Green Footprints Awards, were awarded an outstanding achievement certificate by East Midlands In Bloom in 2009, and won a gold and silver in the village achievement awards run by the Rural Community Council. In 2010 and were finalists in the Community and Partnerships category of the NWLDC\\\\\\\'s Green Footprints Awards and again in 2013. In 2011 we won The Queen\\\\\\\'s Award for Voluntary Service, something of which we are very proud, especially since 2011 was the European Year of Volunteering,. In 2015 we won the Big Tidy Award at the Keep Britain Tidy Jubilee Awards 2015. In 2021 we won the Leicestershire Live Environmental Heroes Award and also won the Community Organisation Award 2021 with Leicestershire Community Champions. We have a facebook page, and we are also on twitter - address is @Thringstone2. In 2019, our chairman was awarded a British Empire Medal for service to Thringstone and in September 2019, her dog, who accompanied her on all her litter picks, was awarded a commendation from the PDSA.

This is a rolling monthly litter picks of different Hunslet Carr neighbourhoods. The Leeds City Council Litter Picking Kit will be supplied, so all you need to do is bring yourself.

Dedicated to cleaning up the environment (we also make websites) -