Rubbish Roundup 22nd July

Rubbish Roundup 22^nd July

For all the negative headlines you read about kids these days, sometimes one comes along who redeems your faith. A nine-year-old girl from Plymouth picks litter from the streets near her home after school, after walking home one day and counting 115 pieces of litter along the way. From that day on, armed with a bin bag and a litter picker, she has gone out at least once per week to pick litter with her parents and says it has made a difference. She said that litter is hurting the animals who often get caught in the litter or try to eat it so she knew that she had to do something. Looks like we have the makings of a little eco-warrior…

The mayor of Fingal in Ireland launched the latest Gum Litter Taskforce gum litter education campaign in a local shopping centre last week. The taskforce has had a lot of success to date in changing people’s behaviour around gum litter and raising awareness of the problem. 93% of people now say they think of chewing gum as litter compared to just 74% when the campaign first began back in 2007, and even better news for the campaign is now 88% of people say they dispose of their gum correctly, up from 54%.

Speaking about the campaign, the mayor said it was a great initiative that rallies communities around a common goal and added that he hoped that this year’s campaign would be just as successful.

The taskforce’s chairman said that the campaign wants to build on its previous successes and launch a broader campaign involving more advertising and a school’s education programme.

A new study has found that discarded cigarette butts can actually harm plant growth. Researchers found that cigarette butts in soil reduced the length of plant shoots and the chance of plants even growing at all by around 25%. This effect was found to apply to both smoked and unsmoked cigarettes, so it wasn’t the burnt tobacco that was the main factor. The only common factor was the cigarette filter, which is made from non-biodegradable plastic fibres.