Neighbourhoods

Creating cleaner, greener spaces

3 things you can do today

Re-route one journey. Pick a car journey you take regularly and try walking, cycling or taking public transport instead.
Meet your neighbours. Discover something good going on near you and get involved. You'll share your skills, meet someone new and help create stronger a community. This is a good place to start.
Plant something. Trees and plants are great for making our neighbourhoods more inviting, and they clean the air too. Silver birch trees are particularly good for reducing pollution levels. NASA did a study into great ways to clean the air and revealed English ivy, philodendrons, spider plants and golden pothos are great options for growing at home.

Go a bit further - run your own campaign.

Love Your Forest

Creative ways to tackle litter in rural areas, using the latest thinking and designs from around the world.

We all want clean and safe spaces around us. Our public polling discovered that a staggering 86% of people think littering is a disgusting habit yet only 15% of us would actually confront someone and tell them that.

Country roads and ancient woodlands strewn with litter is a rubbish problem to have. Each year 250 tonnes of rubbish are removed from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, alone, costing local tax-payers more than £400,000 a year. For every kilometre of road cleaned, three full black sacks of rubbish are collected. Yes sir yes sir, three bags full.

The #LoveYourForest campaign explores different ways to reduce littering in the Forest of Dean area. In 2016 this included a pop-up litter shop displaying 33-year old litter collected from the forest floor, and Communitree faces hung around the forest. The campaign is back in 2017, launching with a Trashconverter Van and a community event.

The litter shop of horrors

Litter from yesteryear was collected from the forest floor and displayed in a one-off art installation. Some vintage pieces even date back 33 years depicting that litter lasts for a very very very long time. Read more.

The Communitrees

If only trees had eyes…well here they did! Weird and wonderful tree faces designed by local children were attached to 50 trees in the Forest of Dean to keep watch on littering. The theory behind the idea came from research revealing that if you feel like you're being watched you're less likely to conduct the undesired behaviour. Read more.

The 2016 campaign generated a high level of local engagement; 30 organisations contributed to the initial research and scoping discussions; 14 primary schools and 2 secondary schools participated in anti-littering educational activities. At least 2,850 local people were actively engaged in the campaign.

Litter monitoring around the Communitree installations indicated a 30% reduction in local litter levels and 82% of people polled would like to see similar projects in the future.

Read the full impact report

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"86% of people think littering is a disgusting habit yet only 15% of us would actually confront someone and tell them that" Well yes, because the sort of person who litters indiscriminately is often likely to be the sort of person who'd punch you in the face for speaking out!

From: Andy Baker

Published: 3 ^rd August, 2017 at 9:08pm

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Hi Emma, they are abundant its of litter aren't they. Great to hear you litter pick to help keep places tidy.

From: Heather Poore

Published: 27 ^th July, 2017 at 1:46pm

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Sports energy gels packs and crisp packets. I litter pick often (in the FOD) and its foil packets central....

From: Emma Parsons

Published: 10 ^th May, 2017 at 9:13pm

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