World Cleanup Day in my 50 hectare backyard!
Phoebe Blackburn
Communication | Facilitation | Editorial | Circular Economy Expert | ENG FR GER | Berlin - Oxford - Remote
?? A nice sunny photo from a week ago: World Clean Up Day in Berlin, at my local park, Berlin's oldest public park – the photo shows myself and a couple of co-volunteers from among 40 or so who came for the cleanup on the day. People of all ages, families with young kids, friends in pairs, pensioners, one man came with his dog, people joining as they saw us during the afternoon.
?? Who would give up a few hours on an often rushed Friday afternoon to clear other people’s trash from their local park? Well, actually, quite a few. It helped that it was a beautiful day in Berlin - 25c and full sun - with many out enjoying the last days of an extended Summer. Nice excuse for some time out for a good local cause. wirBERLIN gGmbH report that over 1k people joined these initiatives in the city last week.
?? ?? ??. So what did we find? Overall, our park’s group picked up around 2.5k bottle caps ('Kronkorker' in German), 10k cigarette butts (the world’s most common piece of trash, did you know?), as well as a few large bags of trash. Weird things found by my trio? Always interesting to note from an anthropological angle...: a golf ball, two plastic tooth flossing devices (for the super well equipped all-night park clubbers - the park is, like all Berlin parks aside Tempelhof, open at night, a key factor in generating waste), golden confetti, a lot of bones for dogs presumably, or left over from BBQs, colourful remains of kid’s birthday party balloons, 70+ small rectangles of pale blue crepe paper around one tree (kid’s birthday party?) we refused to pick up (we’re not Cinderella!), clumps of pristine unused cigarette filters. Pretty innocent for Berlin, but we didn’t go deep into the bushes - the work was painstaking enough as it was.
?? Insights and observations from my first World Cleanup day? ??
#?? 1?? It’s hard to believe that I and two others could spend 3h of our time cleaning up not much more than a 300m2 patch of our huge local park (50 hectares) – much of the trash we picked was embedded, especially small bits of plastic, tin foil and beer bottle tops. We probably removed a fair bit of soil at the same time... We had to force ourselves to move on to a new patch or we’d have spent the whole session on one small area;
#?? 2?? Lack of joined up thinking - there are dozens of actors in the low/zero waste/protection of city parks & nature/circular economy spaces – hard to figure out who does what between NABU e.V. , wirBERLIN gGmbH , Re-use Berlin, Cradle to Cradle NGO (C2C NGO) , the local authorities, Zero Waste Europe etc. - it would be great if these talked to each other more than they seem to;
#?? 3?? ?? ?? A missed opportunity to communicate to some of the main target audiences causing the problem! As we left at 6pm, streams of Friday evening BBQ fans, pick-nickers and party goers to be (after dusk) arrived – a shame no-one from the organisers or the city council didn’t pick up a megaphone, congratulate the waste pickers while mentioning the cleanup, pleading with those arriving to please take their trash home or put it in the bin, with a few key figures to boot, and some flyers to pick up;
#?? 4?? ?? ?? Some localised comms after the event on the park notice board with a few memorable (and fun) pics, facts & figures would also be good. Otherwise it feels like a flash in the pan, people will have soon forgotten... until the next Cleanup next year.
Hard not to feel dispirited: I knew that the next morning our work would have partly been in vain. However, we got to meet a few locals and spread the word and the inspiration. Good too to have been part of the millions of other volunteers worldwide who took part in this initiative started in Estonia in 2018.
We got to keep our gloves for future actions - not the trash pickers or the long wooden tongs - you need to make a request for those from Berlin’s waste management company Berliner Stadtreinigung . Good to know, could be an idea for a team building for some of the local businesses, perhaps even for eco-minded tourists visitBerlin – Berlin Convention Office ? Or for the new local school building on the edge of the park that has just been completed this autumn. An announcement in advance in the park would have been good, too!
?? Bravo to all the volunteers and helpers and to wirBERLIN gGmbH for organising, alongside Zero Waste Berlin, GoNature , and support from the coordination remit for "Natur-, Umwelt-, Klima- und Nachhaltigkeitsbildung" for the Berlin quarter of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Also?to @circularberlin's Candela Fernandez for posting about the event, which is how I knew about it.
Thanks to Karo and Dagmar for being convivial trash pick-up partners - we all got to try out the pincer waste picker, and took turns to carry the cigarette stub bucket... Karo is a translator turned nature photographer, Dagmar recently returned from managing the volunteers at a heavy metal festival in Norway (hence the runes on the T-Shirt).
领英推荐
For the record: I am wearing an old Leap for London 2012 T-shirt I got when I worked at EDF , in London, back in 2007, when the company became one of the first key partners in London’s bid for the Olympics. The T-shirt is still doing fine, and I wore it as a reminder both of the Olympian task ahead – to stop wasting so much of everything - but also for the positive energy the Olympics brought to my birthplace city of London (and to my company) back then. The T-shirt still gives me that positive vibe, no bad thing when picking up a zillion cigarette butts.
?? For talks, workshops, editorial work, positive storytelling around circular economy, waste reduction and avoidance in inspiring ways, and business model rethinks using the Circulab tools, get in touch - you can see what I offer on my website, https://phenomenalwords.com ???
Links for more information:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20180328STO00751/waste-management-in-the-eu-infographic-with-facts-and-figures - for context (to be taken with a pinch of salt, as for most waste data and terminology in my experience).
Yay - you rock,Phoebe Blackburn!????