December Monthly Meeting

South Street is a rural area of east Kent close to the village of Boughton. The purpose of the group is to encourage regular walkers from the area to help keep roads and footpaths clear and tidy.

Provide community facilities for residents

We are dog walkers and pick up on our walks in and around Crowborough, the Asdown Forest and wherever we caravan.

Volunteer group organised by the local Village Hall Committee. We pledge to fight back against the thoughtless discarding of litter from passing vehicles and to try to take action to identify fly tippers and repeat offenders.

Friends of Eastfield Park (FoEP) exists to improve Eastfield Park, Northampton, UK, for the benefit of all its users. We do this through research, planning, consultation and promotion of the Park as well as organising conservation activities (including litter picking) and social events in the Park.

Otterford Parish Litter Pick aims to remove as much litter (and fly-tipped items) as possible from the roads and lanes in the parish - which is located in the beautiful Blackdown Hills AONB on the Somerset/Devon border. We now hold three Litter Picks annually - in March, July and November. After sorting,as much litter as possible is recycled: to date we have recycled 7,446 drinks cans, 6,041 plastic bottles, 1,216 glass bottles/jars, and lots of miscellaneous metal. Since our 17th Pick in March 2020 we have also been recycling plastic food containers and lids, paper and cardboard, and aluminium foil. We are grateful to Whitbread Plc (from when they owned Costa Coffee) and Litteraction for donating equipment and clothing: to Somerset West & Taunton District Council (and their contractor idVerde) for providing litter sacks for each Pick and now collecting the rubbish afterwards; and to Somerset Waste Partnership for donating vests, gloves and sacks.

We aim to clean up and maintain an urban nature reserve and ancient woodland right in the heart of a built up industrial area. Saltwells Woods and nature reserve is well used and well loved, and was recently saved from having a housing estate built on it, but sadly also neglected. With a renewed vigour now the woods are saved, we vow to make the area as CLEAN & GREEN as we possibly can.

CUDS was formed primarily to litter pick around our town and its environs. We do so about 4 times a month for 2 hours each time and then have a cup of tea and the all-important biscuits. We also strip useless bits of turf off areas, dig over, plant bulbs and sow wildflower seeds which we maintain on 2 roundabouts and various other places. At present we have about 28 members. We are not a charity - we are funded by grants for which I apply and have back-up from Dervizes Town Council's Park and Open Spaces team when we can't shift all the stuff we have collected ourselves. When we started over 3 years ago, we were viewed with some suspicion - as in 'Are you all doing Community Payback?' and so forth - interesting to think that a great group of oldies would be doing that! Now, in our bright blue hivis vests emblazed with CUDS on the back, nearly everybody knows who we are - and if they don't, they must have been asleep. We work with local groups - Beavers, the Canoe Club, The Lions at their Fair and recently with The Fulltone Orchestra at their free event in the Market Place. We are also planning our reward - apart from cake, which we have before our summer and Christmas breaks. This time we are going on a day out to visit various gardens in Somerset - it's great to be sociable and many have made firm friends within our group.

I am the sole member of this group so far and would like to recruit other like-minded, local litter-killers. I've armed myself with a litter-picker-upper stick, bought online for a tenner, and I use recycled, plastic, supermarket bags for the collections. I walk around my village on litter-spotting missions every now and then with my fiance and our baby daughter. Good exercise and the lanes look much nicer. 'Hotspots' for litter are the bus shelter and the playing fields. Great feeling of satisfaction too. My aim is to keep our beautiful village 100% litter-free.

Banbury is a lovely town and its surrounding areas look fabulous. If you're interested in keeping it this way, please join us and help whenever you can, as much as you can. We appreciate time is precious but we are positive there are like-minded people out there who will support keeping banbury tidy.