Community woodland planting

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.

Cleaning the local canal, park and Litter picking

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE)

The Green Army has been founded to tackle litter along rural routes around the villages of Harrold, Odell and Carlton in Bedfordshire. Roadside verges leading in and out of these villages will be targeted in a bid to keep our surrounding countryside clean and beautiful, and to provide safe habitats for local wildlife. Any public footpaths or bridleways will also be freed of litter as the need arises. If you are a local resident interested in joining this group please get in touch!

Ilminster Forum is the local regeneration group that helps implement community projects for the benefit of the town and its residents identified through the Community Plan.

The group now has over 100 members. It organises monthly litter picks, and members also litter pick in their own local areas.

An important part of our work is with young people. We have met with Junior schools, Brownies and Cubs, and talked about the reduction of litter and recycling.

We liaise with other environmental groups in the area, particularly those with similar aims to ours and we work closely with the local Borough Council.

We have a website:- www.sandbach-cleanteam.co.uk

Our aim is to keep the roadsides free of litter so everyone can enjoy the Coln Valley.

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.

The Group operates under the aegis of the Town Council. Every Sunday morning, at 9.00, a small band of volunteers (open to anyone to attend) meets at the Civic Centre to conduct a 'swift-pick' in the worst-affected areas (finishing at about 11.00). The Campaign has moved onto taking small patches of public land in the town and overseeing planting out and maintenance. The town's annual beautiful gardens competition is organised by the Group. The Group joins the annual clear-up of the River Uck that flows through the town. Weeding pavements and cutting back undergrowth are also tasks that are taken on. Most of this work is concentrated on the town centre, but a network of 'litter pickers' is being gradually established on the estates around the town. Volunteers are provided with a hi-vi vest, a litter picking stick, gloves and refuse sacks - and we even have wheeled trolleys to take round with you to deal with the large amounts of litter on a Sunday morning. The Campaign has its own (Don't be a) "Mucky Duck" logo.

We are a faith-based charity group committed and dedicated to the Area we operate and in giving back to the Community, we created this group to pick Litters off the streets on every 3rd Saturday of every month by 11.00am. The Aim is to make our environment clean and to make Sunderland the cleanest city in the whole Northeast of England.