Skip to playerSkip to main contentSkip to footer
  • 01/04/2025
This year marks the tenth Great British Spring Clean, launched by the national environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy.
Transcript
00:00National environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy has launched its 10th National Great British Spring Clean,
00:07which sees thousands of volunteers picking litter to protect the environment.
00:11I've been with the team at KFC at Great Homer Street who've been cleaning up their local area.
00:17We're in over a thousand communities up and down the UK and Ireland,
00:21and we just feel we've got a responsibility to those communities
00:25to try and help them be clean and tidy and be nice.
00:30We know that people really care about how their local community looks and feels,
00:37so we just feel like we're on so many high streets and so many communities,
00:42it's a responsibility really.
00:45I think it's important to do events like this to tidy up the area,
00:51get to know the area a bit better, meet new people,
00:54and maybe encourage other people to get involved.
00:57And if you've got big organisations that are willing to do it, that's a bonus.
01:01Since 2016, the Great British Spring Clean has become the nation's biggest mass action environmental campaign,
01:08empowering litter heroes across the nation to pledge to pick more than 4 million bags of rubbish
01:14from the streets, parks and beaches.
01:17That's more than half a million wheelie bins worth.
01:20It comes after the charity revealed 64% of the North West's adults love where they live,
01:25but for 72%, seeing litter makes them less proud of their neighbourhoods.
01:30Take pride in where you are.
01:31Even if you go outside your door, pick up a couple of bits of litter,
01:34that's a couple of bits of litter off the street,
01:36and then you'll find people will come along, they'll join in, they'll ask you,
01:39they'll either turn around and say, you're wasting your time,
01:41or they'll say, well done, either way, you're getting people.
01:44Get in here, get in here and be proud of where you are, give it a go, what have you got to lose?
01:48We've been doing it for five years now, this partnership with Keep Britain Tidy,
01:52and every year we try and make it bigger and better, so we have more restaurants taking part.
01:57We make it slightly a competition between restaurants, because who can pick up the most litter,
02:03who can find the weirdest thing that's been littered, which is quite a popular one.
02:08In a YouGov survey carried out on the charity's behalf ahead of the campaign,
02:1384% of the region's adults said they demonstrated their love for where they live by not dropping litter,
02:19while others said they litter picked and volunteered in their local communities.
02:23Nearly two-thirds of adults across the region say they're disappointed when they see litter in their local area,
02:31while over two-fifths are angry.
02:33They also feel sad and embarrassed, and nearly a fifth even said they called out littering or told others not to do it.
02:41The council have managed to invest an extra £3 million in the neighbourhoods department,
02:46which includes your litter picking and your clean-up and things like that.
02:51But we can only go so far as a council, we need to work together with the residents to make the neighbourhoods cleaner and safer.

Recommended