Clean litter.
Cigarette filters formed most of the waste. - #cleanupday #cigarettebutts #sigaretfilters #plogging Every year the Netherlands Schoon organises Rural Cleanup Day. This year more than 30 thousand participants went out on Saturday 20 March 2021 to clean a piece of the Netherlands. There were a total 87,794 pieces of waste registered. Cigarette filters formed most of the waste, followed by cans and candy or cookie wraps. Red Bull, McDonald's and Heineken were the three most found brands. And, not entirely surprising: 2.1 percent of the waste consisted of mouthcaps. And that's new! Mouth caps, which are casually thrown down everywhere and can be seen even in nature. How “lose weight” clean up the outdoors. - Litter: how the “dropouts” clean up the outdoors. Sometimes the useful is accompanied by the pleasant, as with voluntary garbage turnips. You take a nice walk and you do something for the environment. Organisations and municipalities saw a growth in the number of voluntary waste rappers in the past year. Stichting Nederland Schoon, a nationwide organisation focused on combating litter, counted as many as four hundred more private disposal operations in 2020 than in 2019, an increase of 16 percent. Groningen Schone Thanks to Mijen, a clean-up initiative of the municipality of Groningen, also saw the animo for the disposal of litter rise. The number of applications for waste grippers and rings increased by around nine hundred applications over the past year, more than doubling compared to 2019. Plogging. - On Instagram, you can see the popularity of picking litter in the use of hashtags like #litter (15 thousand messages) and #litterpicking (60 thousand messages) in photographs of collected waste. Also contractions like #wandery (29 thousand selfies during the turnip) and #plogging (171 thousand posts) are popular. Plogging is een porte-manteau van de Zweedse woorden ‘plocka upp '(pick up) and' jogga '(jogging) and refers to exactly that: turnips while running. Organizations like Netherlands Schoon also encourage the use of apps during cleanup. Jaap de Boer developed - Totally Green for 'anyone who just wants to clean it'. The free app tracks routes and shows on a map where people have cleaned. You can see how long ago garbage was picked. For example, a green route means that the last month has been cleaned, brown means that it has been over 90 days. The number of downloads increased from six hundred on January 1, 2020 to five thousand early April this year. For the real fanatics there is Litterati. During the turnip, you can upload pictures of the garbage to the internationally oriented app. They can also tag those pictures, based on the location and the type of waste. For example, you can specify whether it is tin, plastic, paper or other material. If visible, volunteers can also register the producer of the waste. With this information, organizations that focus on combating litter will be able to get started. But who are the voluntary trash rappers actually and what moves them? Three ordinary Dutch people tell about rubbish turnips. - Volkskrant, Wednesday, April 28, 2021. Dick the Great. - “This month is exactly seven years since I started picking up trash. My annoyance about garbage lying around began earlier, after the birth of my son. I then went for a walk more often, so I noticed the garbage more and more. I was mostly grumbling about it on Facebook. A lot of people grumbled with me, but every now and then I got the question why I didn't clean up myself. Yeah, bye, I thought at first, I'm not gonna clean up other people's crap.? But in the end, I started it anyway.. 'First I did it once a week for two hours, but there were more and more. I felt more comfortable with that garbage turnips, it emptied my head. Certainly in the beginning that was an important motive. According to my wife, I became a more pleasant person, because I turned from a grumbler to a doer. 'The cleaning up itself is fun and nice, but of course it doesn't really help against the problem. After a week there is exactly the same. That's why I started collecting data four years ago. What kind of waste is it? Where is the? From what brand is it? This information is useful for municipalities to address the problem in a targeted manner. For example, they know where to put more trash cans. I am now hired by several municipalities and companies to collect data, and I also teach schools about the generation and control of litter. That's how I turned the hobby into my work.’ Bas of Gangelen. - With his Instagram account @afvalbas (1036 according) he shares photos of his displayed, sorted waste and tin figures. 'I've been running hard for about ten years, but from last August I'm going plogging. Then I run with a garbage bag in my hand and gloves, and I regularly stop to pick up trash. When you get home, the garbage bag is always full. If you want to put a serious running time, don't start. I run two a week a lap of about ten kilometers, but if I wanted to, I could do it every day and come home with a full garbage bag. There's plenty! When I get home, I stole the waste and take pictures of it, to make the litter problem more visible. 'Besides cans and plastic I find a lot of mouthcaps. The other day I collected 49 mouthcaps after 80 minutes. I often put it in the back before making the pictures. They are not beautiful, but they are part of it. The cans are the most beautiful, I sometimes make figures of them for the picture, such as Pac-Man. 'A few times I can get angry during the garbage picking up, but you have to get over it anyway, because there's no point in. Uiteindelijk heb ik op meerdere manieren voordeel van plogging. It is healthy for yourself, you do something good for nature and you immediately see results.’ Marlies Feijen. - 'Since the start of corona, I've been volunteering garbage at the Huissen litter brigade. Before that I used to clean up a lot of junk when I went for a walk, but in February last year I saw people walking in yellow vests with such a gripper. That's more fun.! On your own, you'll get the idea that you're cleaning up other people's mess, and in a group you'll also get a lot more fun comments. 'I have something to do myself: it offers me peace and I am often philosophising about how the waste got there. When someone throws away a receipt from a Rolex, I wonder what story is behind it. And maybe someday I'll find something really special, a beautiful piece of jewelry or something. 'The nice thing is also that sometimes you find funny things. I like to share the things I find. The other day I found a plastic shape of a whale and then I say: Look, there's a whale washed up in Huissen. Of course, it's nice when people react. People who do this all follow each other again on Instagram. Now that I'm talking about it like that, I'm actually thinking: I'm going home on time today, and I can still pick up trash. I get very excited about it, I like to search for stuff. My husband and I with dog Kyra. - My husband and I spend at least 4 hours a week picking up the garbage. We (my husband and I) can hardly take a walk without bringing a garbage bag. Even our dog Kyra still dwell on everything that smells like: litter. Source:Volkskrant/28-04-2021/Jasmijn Huisman and Leanne de Munnik. Free Writing: Janne Marthies. Illustrations: #stock #pixapay
