Eleven hearty volunteers rolled up their sleeves on a pleasant day last Friday to discover all sorts of abandoned stuff around the Balmakeith Industrial and Business Park. We were joined on the litter pick by nearby residents as well as members of staff from PHS who have a depot on site.
Within an hour we’d collected what you see in the first picture on our Facebook page – here. We finished after three hours! Despite the enormous haul, we encountered loads of pristine sites large and small.
Some of the rubbish clearly gets blown into corners by the wind, but it’s also possible to see patterns which are specific to particular locations – the car park that gets used at night after everyone’s gone home; the business that unpacks its crates and never clears away the string and plastic ties holding loads together on their trucks; the business whose empty cartons find their way over the fence into no-mans land. Then there’s the favoured spot of shoplifters, strewn about with the security tags you see on clothes in stores; and the building materials abandoned years ago in hidden nooks.
Anyone need bricks or roof tiles, or even paving stones, for their own project? We’ll point you in the right direction.
We didn’t just find the usual bottles and sandwich wrappers. We found a child’s scooter, a kettle, a skateboard, chairs, rusting barrels….and we didn’t go searching off the beaten track (there weren’t enough of us there to venture behind the buildings and along the railway track).