Litter Pick and a Rant (or 2)

Intermittently on Sundays I join a community litter pick group that focuses its attention on the north east sector of Havant - mainly green spaces, parks and urban copses. 

Some weeks (like last Sunday) we recover very little, and while that is an excellent thing, the feeling of not having achieved much discourages some of the newcomers who are eager to 'make a difference'.  Other weeks we tackle an apparently quite tidy grassy park and pull 25 large sacks of rubbish out of the trees, hedges and fences that surround it. (To be fair that clean up extended into the football club carpark next door because the Good Gym people had turned up and we had many hands helping.  The FC ought to be ashamed of the state of the neighbourhood around their entrances.   Even if it is not rubbish generated by their supporters and players, they should take more pride in the image they present of themselves.)

It was on that particular litter pick that I met Anne, 83 years (looks late 60s, 70 perhaps, and I only clocked her real age when she said something about her 62 year old son). Anne had decided there were some things she wanted to do before she was 90. Most of her objectives seemed to be about making a difference in her community even though she hadn't framed them like that. Litter picking was one - "to get out and keep moving" she said.  Among other things, she's also the tea lady for the meetings of the male voice choir at the local community centre.  She knows everyone's favorite biscuits.  

The Annes of our communities go largely unheralded yet where would we be without all the volunteers in charities, in community groups and as individuals, sorting donated goods, serving meals, running food banks, restoring eco-systems,  picking up rubbish, maintaining community gardens, caring, cleaning, driving, delivering, teaching, providing support, organizing fairs and celebrations ...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of  nation's wealth or prosperity, but is calculated based on only those goods and services which are exchanged for money.  It takes no account of the vast body of work which is not exchanged for money, but without which our societies would all but collapse.

Next time you hear your politicians raving about GDP and the economy, resolve to remind them that the monetarily unrewarded economy has enormous value too and cannot, should not, be ignored in the formulation of policy and distribution of resources.

Rant over. 

I permitted myself to get side tracked a bit there. Litter picking. It is a gentle exercise. It is sociable. It has a sense of purpose. 

However it isn't a solution to wastefulness. We go back to the same places over and over, each time pulling out dozens of bags of fresh wastefulness, dumped household goods, and sometimes building (renovation) waste. At population level the message doesn't seem to be getting through. I never used to think it was up to governments to change us but have come round to understanding that this is what good leadership achieves (or ought to achieve). There aren't many examples in this topic of wastefulness but I read somewhere recently (needs fact checking) some facts attached to the UK government ban on handing out free single use shopping bags in supermarkets.  The ban followed years of campaigning to 'bring your own bags' without any meaningful change. Since that ban, and a price on all new plastic bags, new plastic bag use in supermarkets is down to about 10% of what it had been before the ban.  And there has been a huge drop in single-use plastic shopping bags being cleaned up off beaches, river banks and roadsides (something like 20%, or 1/5th, of what it used to be).

Imagine if we could achieve similar results with single-use coffee cups, takeaways food containers, the amount of plastic used in 'presenting' fruit and veg on supermarket shelves, or those horrific 'flushable' plastic wipes I find myself clearing off our local harbour beaches after endless discharges of untreated sewage. And don't let me get started on discharges....

(I must be in a mood to rant today. Pick a topic, any topic, lets see if I can rant about it.)

Cans from our lane, sorted and ready to go for charity fund raising.