'Once you start, it becomes addictive': A day in the life of a litter-picker

Half a mile from Sandwell Council House, Alicia Wingfield and her volunteers are out picking litter on a busy road.

Numerous takeaway trays are dug out by Alicia from brambles near the Sandwell and Dudley train station. There are needles, blue face masks synonymous with the pandemic, and a few cans too, that have been pulled out by five other volunteers.

Alicia says she spends, on average, a good 10 to 12 hours a month for the past ten years litter-picking. She keeps a litter-picker in the boot of her car, and will frequently pull over on her days off to clean something up.

“Once you start litter-picking, it becomes addictive. You can’t help spot the rubbish on our streets,” she says.

We walk around near the DPD depot and Broadwell Park, in Oldbury. It’s already been picked by street cleaners, but we still fill nine sacks of litter in an hour and a half.

The amount of rubbish scattered across Sandwell’s main roads is an eyesore. Packaging from takeaways is the biggest problem, says Alicia.

That’s notwithstanding the real dirty finds.

“I’ve found guns, used needles, sometimes full bottles full of urine,” says Alicia. “Knives too.”

My morning collecting rubbish with Litter Watch was the average of a borough – and country – struggling to tackle Britain’s parasitic relationship with waste.

A study in 2020, published in the journal Science Advances, found the UK and US produced more plastic waste per person than any other major countries.

And while charges on plastic bags and a consultation towards banning single-use plastic plates, cutlery, and cups is a start by the UK government, it’s obvious there’s too much litter in Sandwell, and other West Midlands boroughs, for there to be one dedicated company to deal with it.

That’s where Litter Watch has stepped in. Established in early 1997 to help Tipton residents tackle litter and provide information and support to report litter problems, the charity has become a key environmental partner in Sandwell.

Alicia, who is the chief officer of Litter Watch, has never caught someone dropping litter.

“It’s silly really,” she says. “It always when no-one is looking, so these individuals must know it is wrong.”

Perhaps her 2,400 strong group of volunteers might be able to help?

“They’ve all adopted a street but we can still never track the litter-droppers down”, she laughs.

It’s all light hearted, but there’s a serious need for the Litter Watch. Alicia tells me of volunteers who joined during the coronavirus pandemic who found a whole new purpose in life.

“I had one lady who used to stay in bed and her house all day, everyday. When she joined our group in April 2020, she said she now goes out two to three times a day collecting rubbish around her streets.

“She’s collected 613 bags of litter. Imagine how strong her arms are now.”

If the most recent statistics given to me by the group – 55,000 bags of litter cleaned off Sandwell streets – is shocking then there is much more still to pick up.

It gives her volunteers a purpose. One volunteer, Liam Williams, 23, tells me he is employed with the group via the Kickstart scheme.

“I started this around a month ago and it’s really helped me out. I was in industry before, and I hated it," he says.

“I wanted to go into something to do with the environment, hospitality or health. I like helping people, and it’s a good way to feel like I am doing something in my community.

“There’s always something to clean up though. People are always going to drop litter, and it’s difficult to change behaviours.”

All of this is a signpost of the extremes of capitalism and a throwaway culture.

Some may be critical of a charity group supporting a job that should be done by Serco – the company responsible for waste collection in Sandwell. The council chose Serco in November 2010 to deliver a 25-year integrated waste and recycling service at an estimated cost of £650 million.

But Alicia believes she and her litter volunteers complement the work Serco does, and that they give people normally cast away by society, a real purpose.

“These are people with mental health issues, between jobs, shunned by society. And we give them the tools to say ‘yes, you are making a difference’.”

For her, enforcement is the real problem. Their group plugged part of the gap, but how do you change people’s behaviour, she asks.

“The real problem is enforcement. We should hand out more fines. But it’s difficult because we are now entering the cost of living crisis, and I can tell you, people will think to eat or heat their homes before they pay a litter fine.”

Does the solution lie in the government’s announced ‘National Spring Clean’, according to the Levelling Up White Paper, in which people with convictions given community payback orders will litter-pick and clean up graffiti?

“It’s a good idea, but Keep Britain Tidy and the Great British Spring Clean do something similar. It would make more sense to employ more street cleaners”, Alicia explains.

She tells me a funny anecdote before we depart.

“One of our volunteers found £750 and a bag of weed. We handed it to the police, but after 30 days, no one claimed the money, so the police gave the money back to the group. We reinvested it back into the Litter Watch. That’s one of the good days,” she chuckles.