It is wonderful to see the work of Trish Savill and her Wombles groups being recognised (‘From white goods to ‘driver Tizer’: volunteers pick up slack in England’s fly-tipping crisis’, 28 February). Community-led litter picks are a great way for people and communities to come together and improve their local spaces.
As well as improving our physical landscape, litter picks can have many other benefits. They normalise environmental action as a universal human value and help to transform litter from an environmental issue to a human responsibility. They allow people to unite around shared values and achieve collective goals. They can be educational, planting the seeds of environmental consciousness in the young and old alike. They can help to influence policymakers to support better waste-management policies. They also help to instil a sense of hope that individual actions can lead to global impacts and real, measurable change.
