BAG FOR LIFE
Trash Free Trails helped mountain bikers clean up 50,000 pieces of litter in 2021, this year it’s going after just one bag… each
Fifty thousand pieces of rubbish collected, 4,500km of trails cleaned and 1,500 volunteers doing the job. That’s just a snapshot of the work Trash Free Trails and its army of litter pickers have achieved in 2021, helping to keep the wild places we ride clear of singleuse plastic via organised and massparticipation clean-up operations. Not bad for a charity that started out in 2017 with a bin bag and two pairs of hands: Dom Ferris and Ben Gaby.
Break down the numbers more and they’re even more impressive. TFT asked all of us to organise a litter pick or two, if we could, and tell them about it. Simple stuff. Mountain bikers responded in a typically generous fashion, donating more than 3,200 hours of their time on over 500 picks across the UK, amassing a haul of over 4,700kg of junk.
The journey’s not over yet though, Lucozade bottles (the most commonly found single-use plastic) still roam the countryside and dog poo bags strung from trees haunt car parks like spectres. In response, TFT has just released its roadmap for 2022 and the idea is to take the TFT message to more people, clean up more rubbish and reconnect more people with the natural environment.
“Remove as much as you can, tell everyone about it, then reward yourself,” explains Rich Breeden from TFT. “That last bit is important because no one really wants to be picking up single-use plastic. So have a coffee, beer, cake or