On Sunday 6 October, the Eton community came together to participate in a litter pick (the first of this academic year), in order to help to keep the streets and green spaces of the town clean. Boys, staff, Holyport students and Eton residents assembled at the Town Council Offices, and after donning their fetching high-vis and gloves, set to work on everything from pesky cigarette butts to the ubiquitous plastic bottle.
Armed with litter-pickers and bin bags, the team set off to tidy up, and they didn’t have to look very far to find the rubbish. Bottles, caps, cans, bags and countless other items were found in bushes, on roadsides and even partially buried in soil. Plastic waste is rarely absent from headlines in the modern day, and after the morning’s work – it was obvious why.
Last year, a report commissioned by Trash Free Trails, a non-profit conservation organisation, found that on average UK footpaths contained around 41 pieces of litter per kilometre. The report estimates as many as 9.1 million pieces of litter could be ruining the over 220,000km of footpaths in the country. The authors say the word ‘pollution’ should be used rather than ‘litter’, as “there is clear and growing evidence that this human-made detritus is harmful to the health of the ecosystems that it escapes into. This is the definition of pollution, and we should not avoid it any longer.”
This sobering reality has been little acknowledged by the government, with no commitments related to waste, plastic or recycling in the 2024 Labour Party manifesto. This places emphasis on grassroots initiatives like Sunday’s pick and the work of Trash Free Trails among many other organisations, as change in this case has to start from the bottom up.
On Sunday, the team discovered a myriad of weird and wonderful objects, including lots of household cushions. During past picks, sheets of tin foil, old lamps and even an entire car seat have been found, showing there’s no limit to what people might throw away. The sheer volume of litter each time serves as a potent reminder of our need to consume less, reuse more, and dispose of waste properly.
Events like these are also really important as a way for students to help Eton town as members of that community, separate to the School, as despite the preconceptions of many – they are not one and the same. We are extremely lucky that Eton calls such a brilliant place home, and Sunday’s pick was just one way of giving back to our environment.
