just great!
DAY ONE: Schools across Britain join over 1,000 groups to launch Mail’s Great Plastic Pick Up...
EQUIPPED with gloves and sacks, an army of children joined the nation’s battle against plastic pollution yesterday.
Schools up and down the country – including this primary in east London – signed up to the Daily Mail’s great Plastic Pick Up.
More than 1,000 events have been scheduled around Britain for the three- day drive to clean up our streets and green spaces.
From Truro in Cornwall to Thurso in northern Scotland, sea cadets, rugby clubs and pubs are mucking in among 13,000 registered volunteers.
After joining a school litter pick up yesterday, Theresa May said: ‘It was so encouraging to see how passionate these young people are about their environment.
‘Thanks to the Mail and Keep Britain Tidy, thousands of people will be out at events like this, making a real difference by collecting plastic from streets, parks and public spaces.
‘We all have a part to play to tackle the scourge of plastic waste, which is not only having an impact in our towns and countryside but is also clogging up our oceans.’
The pick up, which ends tomorrow, has
from their cars into the road, they’re making an example to other people. These are grown ups!’ says Shreya. ‘And it makes me frustrated because I can’t even pick it up because I’m not allowed to go in the road!’
Fortunately though, like Shreya, they’re all happy to clean up after their elders, particularly if it means they get a run in the sun when usually they’d be doing English.
They’re having a brilliant time – fighting over squashed lager cans, bickering over crisp packets and chicken and chips boxes and chattering about the Royal Wedding.
‘Meghan’s basically an actress, that means she’ll lose her job which worries me,’ says Shreya. ‘But I’m a big fan and I love the Queen – we even have the same birthday – so I’ll definitely watch the wedding on television though I’m not sure our headmaster Mr Hipperson will be watching it.
‘He says he’s very upset. I don’t know why.’
‘I think maybe he liked Meghan himself!’ says Helen, nine. But they all agree that the Daily Mail’s Big Plastic Pick Up is a great idea – not just to make everything look just so for Harry’s nuptials, but to help the planet, too.
Because underneath the excitement of finding a two-litre lemonade bottle or a discarded remote control for their bulging bags, they all have anxieties about the impact of all this plastic on the planet, many fuelled by the heartbreaking scenes of whales choking on plastic and turtles strangled by plastic waste in Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II documentary.
Helen worries most about the plastic binding that holds cans together. ‘I’m really strict about that,’ she says.
‘I tell everyone to break them up or chop them up before they put them in the bin because otherwise they go off in a lorry to a dump where lots of seagulls go and the big bits of plastic could trap them and kill them. And if they get into the sea and a turtle gets tangled in them it could really harm them.’
Ola is most concerned about the planet’s marine life. ‘I worry about whales and dolphins. They don’t do anything bad and they only eat small animals and they don’t notice that they’re eating plastic, too. It will end up killing them and the beaches will be covered in dead whales and dolphins.’
NOwonder they’re worried. At the rate we’re polluting the planet – each year we dump at least eight million tonnes of plastic in our oceans – by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
It is Sariah who points out that if the fish eat the tiny fragments of plastic in the ocean and we eat them, then we’re all eating plastic, too. They know their stuff but they’ve got their work cut out.
In 2016, the last year for which figures are available, Britons bought products swathed in a staggering 1,119,000 tonnes of plastic waste, of which less than half was collected for recycling. The rest was littered, landfilled, burned or washed up in the sea.
Given the scale of the task, it’s a wonder they’re all so jolly. But they are and spirits are so high in Canning Town that a lady walking by asks if they’re enjoying their school trip. ‘It’s a litter pick!’ they all shout. ‘We’re cleaning the planet! Someone’s got to!’
Even so, they’re a bit nonplussed by the number of plastic water bottles – most of this lot drink from the school fountain – and the carpet of cigarette ends.
St Luke’s – rated outstanding by Ofsted – whose 240 pupils speak more than 30 languages, is a fantastically eco-aware school. It has its own eco-garden growing apples and potatoes with composting and mulching, more recycling bins than I’ve ever seen and an eco-group responsible for encouraging recycling. It goes without saying that Shreya is a committed member.
This isn’t the school’s first litter pick. Their last, done in superhero costumes, threw up some unexpected treasures including a tent covered in snails, a car door and loads of chewing gum with ants stuck to it (‘yuk’ says Sariah). Today’s haul proves just as eclectic. As well as the usual detritis, the children find silver canisters that once contained laughing gas (‘They’re really meant for the dentist,’ explains Dean, the school’s eco co-ordinator, diplomatically), and an entire double divan, complete with two mattresses. ‘That’s a very silly thing to do, really naughty,’ says Shreya. ‘Shall we call the police?’
But what surprises them most is that, barely six weeks since they last picked litter in exactly the same place, they fill eight black sacks – some so full and bulging they can barely carry them – in less than an hour.
Litter picking with this group of six to ten-year-olds is a humbling experience. They don’t understand why people drop litter in the first place. They worry about the impact on the environment, the animals, the marine life and the planet. They think adults are terrible role models but are still happy to pick up our rubbish.
No wonder they worry about the future, but at least they’re prepared to do something about it.
At the end, I ask the million-dollar question – have any of them ever dropped anything, a scrap of litter, a bottle, a sweet wrapper even? They look genuinely shocked. ‘No!’ squeaks Helen. ‘No way!’ says Ola. ‘Never,’ says Shreya. ‘I mostly just put it in my pocket until I find a recycling bin.’