Clean team to target river for latest project
A group devoted to cleaning up Paisley has been taking part in vital environmental training to help them tackle the blight of littering in the community.
Members of the Darkwood Crew joined other Anchor Groups who are part of Keep Scotland Beautiful’s award- winning Upstream Battle campaign to complete the training.
Darkwood Crew, which joined 15 other community groups in the campaign earlier this year, took part in the initiative to help them become better equipped to gather local litter data and use this, with support, to plan targeted campaigns to challenge the behaviours that are causing issues locally.
The aim of the Upstream Battle Campaign is to stop litter travelling from inland sources to sea.
Using their new training, volunteers at Darkwood Crew will now adopt a local stretch of waterway and implement the citizen science aspect of the Upstream Battle campaign – gathering data to help build a wider picture of the litter problem the communities along the River Clyde and its tributaries are facing.
This information will allow them to develop local behaviour, change interventions and will also assist Keep Scotland Beautiful and other partners to further understand litter trends - providing evidence for exploring future national prevention methods.
Terry McTernan, secretary of Darkwood Crew, is delighted the group are taking on a wider Renfrewshire environmental project.
He said: “We will be carrying out four quarterly inspections of the Black Cart river in Linwood.
“It is taking us out of Ferguslie Park and our immediate community but it is exciting as it ties in with our message of improving things globally by improving them locally.
“For the past year, Darkwood Crew has been operating differently so this project really takes us back to the environmental reasons we started the group for.
“We are now working to combine our pre-covid and post-covid aims and get back to improving the environment locally.”
The Darkwood Crew are environmental champions in Renfrewshire, and aim to reduce waste, tackling fly-tipping and make Renfrewshire communities greener and more environmentally friendly.
Since being set up in 2018, the group has prevented 18 tonnes of food from going to landfill and redirecting it into the community, and collected 150 unwanted appliances from homes of residents and redistributed them, which also deters people from flytipping.
Heather McLaughlin, campaigns officer at Keep Scotland Beautiful, added: “The work that our Anchor Group volunteers do, litter picking and surveying, helps us develop a unique picture of the litter entering the River Clyde and its tributaries.
“It was great to be at an event with so many enthusiastic groups to allow them to share experiences and learn from each other about what litter trends there are locally, what can be done to address them, and how behaviours can be changed. It also provided us with an opportunity to explain the context of this project against the national backdrop of a looming litter emergency.”
Find more information about the campaign and details of your local Anchor Groups, so you too can get involved in our fight to tackle marine litter from source to sea at: www. keepscotlandbeautiful.org/upstreambattle/citizen-science/anchor-groups/