Yesterday’s Thames Cliffe Marshes Plastic Clean up was the first of the year and importantly a year since we did the very first one… amazingly February 2018, when we removed from the tide-line as I recall 1.96 tons of plastic and I had an overwhelming 80 volunteers turn up.
Over the year we collected an amazing 3.5 tons in total with two more in May and October and a couple of mini ones thrown in for good measure.
So what of yesterday?
It was really nice to see a total of 66 folk sign in, including RSPB staff, Guardians of the Deep volunteers, Bird Wise members, as well as support from Medway Council Community Team. I also had support from ASDA Gillingham, but as usual the greatest support financially came from Medway Norse who supplied the vast majority of the equipment not least a 20 yard ro-ro skip, without which the clean-up would be a complete non-starter!!!
A big thank-you again to Linda LeGall and Tony Codling of Medway Norse.
The weather was again kind to us with a cloudy, fairly warm and dry day. We were on plot by 10.30 and pretty much got stuck straight in. By about 1.30 people started to drift off. Three hours is a long time to be bending over picking up plastic or raking through vegetation to get to the smaller items. The picture will show how much we collected.
We tried to be a little more scientific this time and at the request of Thames 21 we put bottle tops into a separate container for later analysis.
When the final weight and analysis of the plastic is done I will publish it.
A final thank you to all the volunteers and supporters for their help and the next project will be shopping trolleys and bikes out of the mud at Sun Pier to Doust Way, Chatham/Rochester.