Stopping fly tipping

As my regular reader will know, back in the spring the Friends of Chopwell Wood had its annual spring clean. Its unfortunately true of any area of the countryside, that small minority just doesn’t care about the litter, rubbish or trash they leave behind when they visit an area of beauty. Thus the FoCW along with the Forestry Commission carry out an annual spring clean to try to remove some of the rubbish that has just been dumped in the wood. Rubbish removal is not just confined to then, the first time I met the Ranger she was collecting rubbish, and others do it on a regular basis, but on this day a concerted effort is made to clear out what is mostly discarded drinks can, bottles and sweet wrappers etc. However, the other problem is that of fly tipping. To explain for my overseas reader, that is where rubbish is illegally dumped, sometimes by individuals but often by companies that are trying to avoid paying landfill tax.

It is probably the greatest single gift that the Friends of Chopwell Wood provided for the Community was to pay for a series of barriers that are in place on the Fire Roads (Dirt or stone tracks that enable Fire fighters to access the woods), thus preventing the fly tipping that used to occur on a grand scale. It still happens, but nowhere near as much as it did in the past. But following the last Spring Clean, a suggestion was made by our Earth Skills supremeo, that we asked the local authority if a skip could be placed near a particular entrance to the wood, so that instead of people dumping rubbish in the wood, it could at least be skipped and help reduce the costs of clearing such items illegally dumped.

Because I was already in contact with some of the local councillors, I was asked to place the idea before them. Latter I discovered that this had been asked for several times in the past but to no avail. Therefore, I was not totally confident that it would happen. But with the persistence of naivety, eventually a compromise solution was reached, and a Skip has been placed in the park very close to the entrance to the wood were most of the rubbish dumping occurs.

It has been there for some time now, and while I wanted to report the good news sooner, there was some concern that we would have further incidents of the skip being set alight. It was the concerns about a pyromaniac setting the skip on fire that prevented it from being sited right at the entrance to the forest as any fire in the skip would have set the wood ablaze too.

The real test of if this has worked will be if there is less rubbish to collect next year. I doubt that it will reduce the volume but it will allow the volunteers to go further a field and expand the area of the forest we are able to make free of rubbish.

While I hope that I will not have to talk rubbish again, well I know that some think that’s all this mouse does, until every one takes responsibility for their waste, I guess that it will come up as a theme again.