24 Jun 2024
New Greens’ litter picking success story, the Saturday Pickers has celebrated its first birthday – that’s 52 Saturdays of consecutive rubbish collecting in AL3, and what a difference it has made!
The group started when the father and daughter team of Damian and Grace Gaskin embarked on a litter-picking walk, and now boasts 27 volunteers, a cargo bike, walkie-talkies and 550 hours of street cleaning.
Organiser, litter-picking compulsive, recent Green Party candidate and St Michael’s parish councillor Damian said: “A year ago there was so much rubbish the team could only cover a hundred yards in one hour, and now they can cover half the estate.
“Saturday Pickers has such a strong social media presence that we forced Veolia to replace dilapidated public bins and the district council to fill the infamous ‘New Greens hole’ – a void in the ground with a wheelie bin dropped in it which remained like that for one ‘hole’ year.
“One of the team, Anne McQuade, also made an incredibly thought provoking art installation out of a thousand cigarette butts,” he added.
“The team do have expenses which they pay out of their own pockets. Despite the fact they are saving the council 550 person hours a year litter picking the team receive no funding and their time is given freely.’
Further more, Damian has announced the creation of a new chapter, Saturday Pickers ‘Ladies Grove & Oyster Fields’. This group will begin cleaning up at 8am on Sunday 23rd June, venue TBC.
For anyone who would like to join Saturday Pickers please email damiangaskin@me.com
Every Saturday at 8am the gang are out and about discovering, like the Wombles, the things that the every day folk leave behind. In honour of making it through a whole year, the Pickers of New Greens have announced their Top 10 Pick of the Year’s Picks.
In at ‘10’ – the mattress with the moistness. A fly tipped double which could literally photosynthesise and sustain an entire ecosystem. (April 6 2024) Here it is on the Saturday Pickers’ cargo bike, that shuttles large items and full bin sacks back to base.
At ‘9’, the bed of dread. (April 20 2024)
Charting at ‘8’, a sight for circular saw eyes. (July 2 2023)
This particularly gruesome discovery took seventh place, and a trip straight to the police station. (May 12 2024)
At ‘6’, it’s those cancer sticks. These, collected in one hour by a lone volunteer on September 16 2023.
And showing what a ‘can-do’ attitude the Saturday Pickers have, here at ‘5’, the aluminium recycled in just one hour by two volunteers picking in the bushes between Harpenden Road and New Greens. (October 14 2023)
Setting a new record at ‘4’ for the heaviest and most unpalatable find, concrete, solid, solid as a rock. But that’s what we’ve got. (July 15 2023) And Saturday Pickers had it removed from where it had been left to turn to stone.
Number Three has to remain a little cryptic in case young readers are educating themselves on these pages. We cannot post a picture. It may well have been a very badly judged Christmas present, a stag-do item or a purchase for a particularly lonely and deranged individual. Let’s just say it was in the woods, with a large cardboard box and address label, which Saturday Pickers keep in a safe. Put it this way, on January 13 2024, the Pickers thought at first sight they had found a severed head.
At ‘2’ – the needles. (July 15 2023) On one of the very first Saturdays, the team found these nasty syringes in the raised beds by New Greens shops. Since then the team have not, thankfully, discovered any more.
And this year’s winner, the Pick of the Picks, for the sheer arrogance, complacency and laziness of the workers who dumped heavy duty road barriers and their stands in the beautiful Batchwood woods under a fallen tree a few meters from Toulmin Drive. And of course, their stupidity for leaving the UK Power Network identifying label, date of works 20-08-18 and permit no. EC30034800619. This was found on January 13 2024 and so had been left there for almost six years.
