Wish You Weren’t Here anti-litter campaign

Blackpool Gazette

Fylde Council is launching its summer 2025 anti-litter campaign - Wish You Weren’t Here!

Transcript

00:00we've launched an anti-litter campaign to encourage visitors to take all their

00:16litter home with them we had a particularly bad weekend last weekend we

00:20had the St Anne's carnival and the beach was just a whole blanket of litter

00:26obviously we want visitors we welcome them we want them to take to bring

00:30picnics take advantage of our local takeaways and food outlets but we want

00:35them to act responsibly as well we've got 15 bins within along the whole of the

00:41seafront here and so you're never far from a bin and really in my opinion is

00:47no excuse not to dispose of your litter responsibly

00:51we're fortunate that we've got an amazing group of volunteers the litter

00:58pickers who come along and collect all the rubbish for us but I'm without them

01:02would be really really stuck we don't know what we'd do it there would be an

01:06even greater cost of the council to employ staff to pick litter very

01:13enthusiastic and fortunately they really like their work but even they are

01:18dismayed often when they come along in the morning to see the amount of litter

01:22that people have left that they just can't believe what they're seeing and

01:26it's a shame we've got a good group of people who's a large volunteer group we

01:30meet once a week on a Saturday morning and we'll go out and we'll clean the beach

01:33in the summer we go out every night there's a need to do that just because

01:38the volume of litter that's left the last weekend we collected over 10,000

01:42items off the beach of rubbish and we only go out for an hour at a time the

01:50tide will take it if we don't it's going into the sea and ingested by marine

01:54animals which lead to starvation and ultimately then they end up washed upon

01:59offshore

02:02you see quite a few dead seabirds often seabirds will kind of feed plastic to

02:07the young and not realize that it's damaging we have sand lizards on the

02:13dunes which are quite a rare species there's stories of kind of them growing

02:18into bottles or cans and things like that getting stuck and dying and those it has

02:23a real kind of effect

02:25when we get a lot of visitors and we get the good weather it certainly spikes

02:30particularly in the dunes we get a lot of people having parties and things where

02:36they shouldn't be and there's a lot of litter left there a lot of litter from

02:39the beach ends up in the sea and is then washed back in on the strand line so

02:43that's where it kind of accumulates it's disheartening we pick up that volume of

02:48rubbish and then we come back the day after and it's the same again you know

02:51it's relentless we're going out and and it's upsetting it is upsetting we find

02:57buried nappies buried wipes carrier bags plastic bottles but then other items

03:01towels uh tents um items buckets and spades you know things like we're in a

03:07throwaway society like money's not doesn't matter they don't think the tie

03:11comes in and out twice a day here it does and it can come up to the sea wall if we

03:15don't take it out it goes

03:18the message is everybody's welcome we want you to come here um but please leave take

03:25your litter with you when you leave i think we've got 870 bins across filed um so yeah please use

03:32them beautiful environment we like to keep it beautiful you want to come because it's beautiful

03:37but we don't want the rubbish we definitely do not want the rubbish here you've got to take it home

03:44room and you go yeah

03:46well

03:47well

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