The Professional Litter Picker.

I am not saying that anything will come from this latest little adventure, but what I do know is that if I hadn’t have done it, there would have been no possibility at all.  I do know that if I don’t get it written down tonight then it might not get written at all.  The adventure lasted less than an hour but it seemed to work and I want to log it in my memory, and on my blog.

…and as the blacksmith or farrier delays in shaping the iron in his forge when it is hot and pliable and the metal soon cools and hardens, the opportunity is lost, (Strike while the iron is hot!).

I’m still banging on about paying people (and being paid myself) to clean enormous amounts of plastic from our beaches, and in a small fit of frustration on Friday I put a request out on Twitter, Facebook and on my Blog.

Following my payment to a friend last month of £50 for an hour’s beach clean, this time I upped it a bit and offered £100 for an hour’s beach clean.  Timings didn’t quite work out and I was unable to employ the single applicant from Twitter and the other single applicant from Facebook, but I didn’t want to just give up.  So I wrote some words with a marker pen on an old piece of green kitchen worktop and took it down to Worbarrow Bay on the Dorset coastline.

I attached the sign to my camera tripod for all to see, and within ten minutes a family decided to apply.  Four teenagers, with their parents alongside said they would clean up small bits of plastic for fifteen minutes each.  In return I would pay each of them the sum of twenty five pounds sterling.  In fact I had to stop them from working after half an hour.  They were quite enjoying themselves!

I had a couple of very interesting conversations with people on the beach, picked some plastic myself, and returned to my car, seemingly, job done.

Who knows if anything will come of this little adventure.  What I do know is that I am going to do more of them.  And I also think they will get better, more adventurous, more interesting, more effective, and hopefully more fun.

It worked.  Cool.

About a month ago I paid a friend of mine to help me pick plastic and litter off a beach. I advertised wanting one person for one hour’s litter picking, the wage, £50.  We went to Eype, a small community a few miles South West of Bridport in Dorset, in the United Kingdom.

We picked for over an hour, each of us collecting a bucket full of trash.  Eype beach doesn’t seem to attract too much trash, so it was mostly small stuff.  But small stuff that can cause all sorts of damage to wildlife, marine life and the environment in general.

With my continued desire to be paid and to pay people to take plastic off our beaches, I announce the second high paid beach clean.

I am after one person over the age of 16 who would like to help me collect plastic/trash off the beach at Worbarrow Bay in Dorset in the United Kingdom.  The date, Sunday 26^th August 2018.  The time of day to be arranged.

For the one hour of work I will pay £100, yes, £100!  I offer no travel expenses, (although I could give you a lift if close by), and no medical insurance.  I have litter picking equipment.  Applications should be fit, enthusiastic, responsible, healthy, keen, honest, on time.  Please bring your own food and drinks.

I will advertise the ‘position’ on Twitter and Facebook, and will correspond with applicants in the order in which  they ‘potentially’ contact me.

So that’s it, August Bank Holiday Special.  One hour’s beach clean-wage, £100.  Please contact me via Twitter, Facebook or via this post.  Any questions, please ask.

Thank you.

I went to Abbotsbury, and down to the beach there on Chesil Bank.  I wanted to make a video and needed ten littered plastic bottles which I knew would be lying around the beach there.

But miracle of miracles, I could only find one plastic bottle, (plenty of fishing line, wetwipes, plastic wrappers etc).

Anyway, even though I didn’t have the material I wanted for my video, I made it anyway.  Here it is:

I meant to include the fishing net clean up photographs in the last post too!  Here they are:

Sabbatical over!  Until last week and for the past four months I have done very little litter picking.  The huge swell of awareness of plastic pollution brought about by David Attenborough’s Blue Planet has made me try and work out where I can best put my efforts to helping clean up the World.

I have been looking for direction…

I watched a film/documentary put on at Sherborne’s Digby Hall last week,  A Plastic Ocean.  Amazing film, four years in the making.  Journalist Craig Leeson travelled around the world having witnessed the devestation of plastic pollution whilst filming Blue Whales.

Far more hard hitting than Blue Planet, in my opinion.

The best way to see it is either online or at a public viewing.  Google for details.

What really got me back on the litter picking track was to see how much good one can do by picking up even the smallest amount of litter.  Heart breaking shots of birds not much bigger than our hand but with over two hundred pieces of plastic in their tiny stomachs.

I gotta make some more videos.  I gotta make the money to employ serious beach cleaners.

Below is this weeks work.  Unpaid yet again…but maybe this will change!

The venue is Eype beach and rocks, just West of Bripdort in the county of Dorset in the UK. It was quite an effort.  There must be at least  two, three, four hundred pounds of netting in the back of my car now.  Time to recycle it.

Here’s the epic film trailer:  A PLASTIC OCEAN.

Seems daft, but I was may as well try.  Absurd sales have happened on e bay before.  Seeing as I haven’t managed to find a second sponsor for my Dorset Coastline 10,000 plastic bottle collection yet, I have decided to auction of the marine litter I have collected in my storage container.  Picture below:

The collection fits neatly into 4 large cardboard packing boxes, 5 including the buoys.

Any proceeds obtained from the auction will go towards the further collection of around 9,500 bottles still to be collected from the Dorset coastline.  Funds will go towards extra equipment, fuel for the car, and payment for helpers.  A percentage of the sale will also go to the lads and lasses at twominutebeachclean and plastics2fuel.

I ‘could’ get a sale.  Update will follow with any positive news!

Hope you have had a happy Christmas.  Happy New Year to you all, Simon.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mixed-Plastic-Marine-Litter/202163464810

I’ve just launched a campaign on both Twitter and Facebook.  Who knows if it will take off?  Who knows if it is a good idea or not?  Like many initiatives, you don’t really know unless you try.

I have asked people to pick up ten littered containers, photograph them, bin or recycle the littered containers and then invite a few others to do the same.

No injuries please.  Pick safely.  Have fun.  Be a part of the solution to our Planet’s littered Environment.

#thetencontainervirallitterchallenge

I expected to find a lot of plastic bottles at Chapmans Pool on the Dorset coastline but I didn’t expect to find two hundred of them in a ten yard stretch, but I did.  It took me twenty minutes to collect them.

It took me over an hour to get to the coast, half an hour to walk to the ‘bottle hoist’, half an hour back to the car and over an hour to return.  It took another hour to drop the bottles off at my storage container.  A mornings work for two hundred bottles.

If I had had other people with me we could have collected five hundred quite easily.

Still looking for that ‘second’ sponsor to help fund these clean ups.  Keep picking.  Keep taking photographs.  Keep making silly videos.  Keep on with Social Media.  Keep talking to the Press.  Keep on ‘keeping on’, and it could, should, can happen!

315 bottles of the 10,000 goal.  3 percent done.