P-p-p-pick up plastic some

This is your big chance to join in our groundbreaking Great Plastic Pick Up campaign. Next weekend, individuals, families, groups and whole communities across the nation will be getting together to gather up litter with one huge mission in mind – to win the war on plastic. In recent months, the Daily Mail has highlighted the horrific effects of plastic on our wildlife and oceans – and now you can do something to help.

For the first time ever in a litter pick up on this massive scale, we will be urging everyone to separate plastic bottles and aluminium cans from other rubbish. You can get colour- coded bags, made of 100 per cent recycled plastic, from your local authority to make this even easier – visit greatplasticpickup.org to find out if your council has them. But even if you can’t get hold of these, you can still join in using recycled plastic rubble sacks or strong bin bags, provided you keep your collected litter correctly sorted into three separate bags, as explained below. Your local council will also tell you where to take your bags once you’ve filled them.

By taking part, not only will you be ridding your local area of ugly litter and saving the innocent wildlife it harms, you will also help to divert plastic waste directly into the recycling process so it can be reused, reducing the amount of new plastic in the world.

Even if you live hundreds of miles from a beach, you can be confident you will be making a major contribution to protecting the world’s oceans from the scourge of plastic. An estimated 80 per cent of the plastic washing around in oceans originated on land. That’s because, wherever you live, inland plastic is blown on to rivers and out to sea on a windy day, and when it rains heavily, the rubbish littering the gutter is washed into storm drains or overflowing sewers, eventually making its way into the ocean.

So that casually discarded chocolate wrapper is just as likely to poison a whale or a turtle whether dropped in Birmingham, Edinburgh or Bude. Globally, rivers carry over two million tonnes of plastic into the sea annually. And as the BBC’s Blue Pla net ser ies last autum n showed so clea rly, t he world’s oceans simply cannot cope.

But if you join our Great Plastic Pick Up, you will be taking the best possible step to reducing that burden.

SORT IT OUT

Although much of the rubbish you collect on the Great Plastic Pick Up might be technically recyclable, unfortunately local authority rules on what they can accept for recycling vary widely across the country. So we are focusing on separating plastic bottles and aluminium cans for recycling, with all other litter items classed as general rubbish. Unlike other forms of rubbish, plastic and aluminium have a horribly long lifespan if left as lit- ter. An item of plastic, for instance, might eventually break down into tiny pieces – so-called micro-plastics – but in many cases, these will never fully disappear. And that casually discarded single- use plastic water bottle could remain recognisably bot- tle-shaped for as long as 450 years if it slips through the net and doesn’t make it into the recycling stream.

Every sack of plastic bottles you gather on your Great Plastic Pick Up next weekend provides many reasons to be proud. You might find just a few bottles, or perhaps hundreds, but each one you package off to be recycled means you are saving potentially thousands of pieces of plastic from finding their way into the ocean to poison sealife for decades to come.

The plastic bottles you collect

should be emptied, crushed and the lid replaced, if you can find it, and put in a blue bag. Aluminium drinks cans and their ring-pulls go in the red bags. All other rubbish, such as cardboard, paper, juice cartons, crisp packets, coffee cups, cigarette stubs and plastic food trays, should go in the white bags.

It’s crucial all these items go into their correct bags. If general rubbish finds its way into the blue or red bags, this could mean the whole bag is contaminated and therefore unable to be sent for recycling. By the same token, any plastic bottles or aluminium cans put into the white, general rubbish bags will not be able to be recycled.

If you want to pick up any glass bottles or jars you find, these should be placed in a bucket or box and taken to your local recycling centre.

Even the non-recyclable rubbish you collect will make a huge and long-lasting difference. A Keep Britain Tidy study showed that brightly coloured branded items (such as some crisp packets and sweet wrappers) that had been discarded attracted more litter faster than other discarded items, making these important things to pick up and take away.

If you want to go the extra mile, you could send hard-to-recycle waste such as biscuit wrappers, coffee pods and cigarette butts to be recycled – see terracycle.co.uk.

By clearing an area of litter as part of the Great Plastic Pick Up campaign you’ll be helping make your community a safer place too. Scattered litter can very often encourage fly-tipping, vandalism and other anti-social, illegal and unhealthy behaviours. But by joining our campaign and working together with friends, family and neighbours to clear up the litter in your community, you could be creating a healthier, happier environment.

And you’ll be preventing tonnes of waste plastic from poisoning the world’s oceans while you’re at it. So what are you waiting for? If you haven’t already done so, go to greatplasticpickup.org and sign up today.

Rubbish washed up with the tide on the Thames in London