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When Tim Gibbes goes out to walk his two dogs, Milo and Cocoa, he doesn’t go unarmed.
He takes gloves, rubbish bags and a litter picker and no piece of trash that crosses his path remains untouched.
The 83-year-old Palmerston North man says he’s ‘‘no greenie’’, but he’s made it a mission to clean up wherever he goes.
‘‘I take my two small fellas for walks in the Linklater Reserve, and it was becoming a poo shop, with people there and their dogs without bags, so I started picking stuff up.’’
The mess gave dog owners a bad name, he said.
Yesterday, the former motorcycle racer spearheaded a three-hour Keep New Zealand Beautiful Week clean up at the city’s Matthews Ave train station.
‘‘I was told that when you retire, you get even busier, so I haven’t retired – I don’t want to get that busy.’’
Gibbes asked for volunteers at the train station because when it’s wet, that’s where he walks his dogs. The rubbish left behind around the station by ‘‘over-nighters’’ was a real shame he said.
‘‘The grabber doubles as a walking stick, but I asked for help [yesterday] because I couldn’t handle the clean up here on my own.’’
Earlier in the week, Gibbes and 35 other volunteers took part in the lunch-hour Tennent Drive Tidy Up organised by Tom ‘‘Captain Planet’’ Carr from Fonterra and Heather Knox from Palmy Rocks.
Supported by the city council and Fonterra, the Keep New Zealand Beautiful tidy up resulted in 27 bags of rubbish collected from car parks, reserves and roadsides on and around the busy stretch of road.
Gibbes headed for the Te Motu o Poutoa, also known as Anzac Park, car park where in less than an hour he bagged up 1020 cigarette butts, along with an assortment of other litter.
As for the butts, it wasn’t a matter of counting each one, it was more a calculated guess based on past pick ups.
‘‘I know a [cardboard] milkshake container holds around 200 cigarette butts, so when I’ve filled five of them, that’s 1000 butts. I then picked up 20 more,’’ Gibbes said.
He has tidied up in Anzac Park before. In August, accompanied by students from Institute of the Pacific United, he helped spruce up the site.
‘‘We left it looking like a new pin. Four days later, I couldn’t believe the amount of rubbish that was there.’’
Cigarette butts are a particular gripe.
‘‘I spoke to some young guys up there and asked them if they realised their cigarette butts were litter and did they know that [butts] were polluting. They said ‘Nah, cigarette butts are alright’.’’
When he asked them not to leave their butts on the ground, they became confrontational.
He had no choice but to leave them to their ways, he said.
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