It’s Cromwell’s mission to help make the world cleaner, greener, and more resourceful — and this spring, we’re once again backing that up with action… litter picking action!
We’re proud to be taking part in the Great British Spring Clean 2025, organised by Keep Britain Tidy, and encouraging our team, customers, and partners to roll up their sleeves and help make a difference in their communities. This year marks the milestone of a decade of GB Spring Clean Litter Picks. Over this time, the picks have grown larger, the team has expanded, the area we cover has widened, and the picking efforts remain just as strong as ever. This year we took inspiration from the Sherburn Business Litter Pick, we held back in October and opened our litter pick up to fellow businesses in our area.
Community Clean Up
The date was set for 27th March, with the location being the neighbouring Industrial Estate, this has been proven to be a hot-spot for litter and victim of irresponsible waste handling. With a team of 7 from Cromwell ready to tackle the waste, we called for reinforcements from other businesses and were delighted by the response. Overall, we had 24 volunteers from local businesses to help with our GB Spring Clean, with staff from XPO, Sainsbury’s and Humdinger / Kinnerton Confectionery grabbing a refuse sack and litter picker and hitting the streets with us.
With a total of 31 litter picking heroes on board, we were able to split up and head to the various areas of the industrial estate, each with its own unique types of waste, which were safely collected. The paths and walkways saw an abundance of food packaging, including drinks bottles, sandwich packets, crisp packets and even beer bottles. The bus stops saw similar items but were also hot spots for disposable vapes and cigarette ends. As we delved deeper into the shrubbery and off the main road area, this is where fly-tipped items were found: several plastic buckets, metal sheets, wooden pallets – all had been wrongfully dumped. The efforts from the team were second to none, and we collected a total of 36 bags of rubbish, filled to the capacity. In addition to these filled bags, an abandoned toolbox, a broken traffic cone and a smashed wooden pallet. After the pick, the waste was quickly collected by the local council, to ensure our efforts are not ruined by vandals, wildlife or the elements.
How to help
One thing was evident by the search – there were many accessible bins in the area, yet, unfortunately, the litter was still prominent. The issue seems to be a behavioural one, often when people see a highly littered area, they are more likely to litter themselves, and with the amount of rubbish found, it does seem likely this is the case. Now, however, the areas that are heavily pedestirianised including public transport routes, paths, nearby large businesses and along the ‘resting zones’ for lorry drivers. Hopefully seeing the litter-free zones will encourage the public to keep them this way, and set a good example for how the area should look and keep it well maintained.
Our efforts were also noted on social media on local community groups, from which we received great feedback and thanks from the locals – one can only hope that from this they will respect the work we have done and continue to keep the zone clean and tidy. Overall, it is all about being responsible for our waste and ensuring we do our part to keep the environment clean – whether this is binning our litter, taking it home or even carrying out a pick themselves, every action to help keep litter from the streets is helping create a more sustainable planet.
We have more litter picks planned for later in the year, with both our sponsored community sporting teams and other annual clean-up days such as the GB Beach Clean, Cromwell are committed to continuing our efforts to create a cleaner, greener planet. Alongside partaking in litter picks, we can also facilitate other people’s waste collections with our CHSA-rated, high-quality litter picking sacks. All our waste sacks have been manufactured with resource efficiency in mind, and our litter-picking sacks help us go even further sustainability-wise by collecting wrongfully discarded waste. Talk to our team today, and discuss your waste management requirements and we will be able to find you the best solution for your litter pick.