Ahead of growing season, we have been litter picking in the Cefn Glas stream that runs through the land of our community site. We began collecting images of our findings when it became apparent that some of the rubbish found spans several decades judging by the remaining expiry dates and old-fashioned item designs.
What started as a little project on the side soon became a gradual process that took place over a couple of weeks as a lot of the litter was lodged in the soil, between rocks or on steep parts of the bank. We have now collected most of the litter that was there and we’re very pleased to see the difference and having restored some of the natural qualities around the stream, which has a lovely, natural forest look, babbling sounds and many birds, insects and wildlife visiting.
What we found was only surface level, and it’s likely that more litter is present underneath layers of earth or organic matter. Over a long time things, unfortunately, do tend to get buried. Obviously, only a full excavation can then unearth all of these items.
Items that we found ranged from glass and plastic bottles, cans, plastic bags, DIY debris and polystyrene, to snack packaging, chairs, bicycles and scooters, TVs, traffic cones, metal, toys, golf balls, tennis balls and footballs, kitchenalia, clothing, car parts, and the list goes on and on. A lot of these items were possibly thoughtlessly dumped or tossed into the stream. Lighter items are more susceptible to have been blown into it when not properly disposed of in bins. Most of these items do not decompose like organic matter does.
The oldest remaining expiry date we found was on a Walkers crisps packet from May 1995 – nearly 26 years ago.
Keep Wales Tidy
The Welsh charity, Keep Wales Tidy, supplied us with red bags to put the litter in. In total, we collected round 40 – 50 of these large bags full of litter.
Streams, like most bodies of water do, run to sea. The Cefn Glas stream runs into the River Ogmore, and meets the Bristol Channel “down the road” from the seaside town Porthcawl.
In this project, we only covered one part of a small stream. In the bigger scheme of things, there’s 1,500 discrete river systems, comprising over 200,000 km in the UK, accumulating huge amounts of litter into our oceans, which make up over 70% of the Earth’s surface. This has catastrophic consequences for wildlife and water cleanliness and the impact is very difficult to reverse once it’s out there, swept up and down the oceans by the tides and different currents, waiting possibly for centuries, if not longer, to be washed ashore on some remote part of the globe, if it hasn’t sunk onto a seabed already. On a global scale, the accumulation of litter in this way by a world population of billions of people, is even worse.
A lot of people out there are more aware and putting in the work to reduce pollution nowadays and it is reassuring that a lot of the litter we found appeared to be older, rather than everything being from more recently, however we wanted to help remind people about the impact that a thoughtless “I’ll just toss it into the stream, and assume it will somehow end up in a bin…” sort of mentality can have.
If you are interested in finding out more about eradicating waste and litter in Wales, visit Keep Wales Tidy.
To find out how long an items takes to break down in the sea, check out this Long Lasting Litter timeline by Natural Resources Wales.