Fighting waste together, one man and his dog
ARMED with a litter picker and rubbish bags, tireless Wayne Dixon has embarked on a unique crusade against waste blighting the country’s coastline.
Accompanied by his Northern Inuit dog Koda, he is believed to be the first person walking the 7,000-mile route around the Great British coastline to collect litter – filling dozens of bags a day as he goes.
He said: ‘We’ve become litter-blind as a nation. We need people to take a pride in their communities once again.’
In almost three years so far, Mr Dixon and his dog have covered 3,500 miles.
Mr Dixon, 47, initially travelled from Knot End, on Lancashire’s Fylde coast, to Kinlochleven, west Scotland, in 2016, before stopping for bad weather in November that year.
He resumed his mission in early 2017, setting off from Formby, Merseyside, making his way around Wales, Devon and Cornwall, and reaching the Lizard in December.
Mr Dixon took a break for Christmas, then resumed the walk in Cornwall, heading along the south coast to the New Forest, Hampshire, which he reached last September.
He plans to return to his mission this spring after returning home to Lancashire to recover from a muscle injury.
He said: ‘Each year, over 40million people visit UK beaches, if everyone who visited a beach just picked up one piece of plastic or litter, then that’s 40million pieces of plastic taken out of the sea.’