Litter heroes clean up tonnes of urban trash
Peter Turney has been picking up rubbish in Wellington suburb Tawa for about 10 years.
He started cleaning up leaves and branches around his street in 2008 but noticed that rubbish was tied up in it.
Turney said he decided to make collecting litter part of his weekly routine and now he walks for about four hours several times a week to collect litter. ‘‘I’ve almost made it my job.’’ Turney sets out early in the morning with plastic bags from the council tied to his belt, and he aims to finish with at least two full bags.
‘‘I have an unwritten agreement that if I leave the bags by a particular litter box, they [the council] know it’s me, and they’ll take it to the landfill for me.’’
As a Christian, he felt it was his duty to protect the environment and the four-hour walk kept him fit.
‘‘It saves me gym fees.’’ Gordon McCrone picked up litter for 10 hours a day, seven days a week for three months after returning to Wellington in 2015. When living in Australia he was hit by a car while cycling in a 60kmh zone, and was left with painful spinal damage. His doctor suggested moving as much as possible to ease the pain.
‘‘It’s significantly improved my condition, my weight and my fat, and the pain in my spine.’’
McCrone said it was the tiny pieces that were the hardest ‘‘back-breaking work’’ and the most time-consuming to pick up.
Over three months he had moved 6 tonnes of trash working at a speed of one piece of rubbish every four seconds.
He focused on Wellington’s Town Belt and the National War Memorial. ‘‘Wellington High School by Victoria Tunnel was so bad at the back of their field that you could not see the ground!
‘‘There was a trail walked through the rubbish. [It] took me two days just there.’’
At the National War Memorial the rubbish was five layers deep, he said.
If every New Zealander picked up a piece of rubbish today, that was 4 million pieces of rubbish, he said.
Wellington resident Lee-Anne Duncan said if people didn’t litter in the first place, campaigns to clean beaches and coasts may not even be needed.
There needed to be more of a focus to reduce ‘‘urban littering’’ – before it reached valuable coastlines. She said that until this year she would go running by litter, barely noticing it.
But this year she felt compelled to slow down and collect litter on her walks around Kelburn and Northland, and she rarely collected less than one bag of rubbish.
Duncan said the messages to ‘‘be a tidy Kiwi’’ which she had grown up with seemed to have disappeared. ‘‘If people didn’t litter at all, there would be nothing to pick up.’’