Litter splitter

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Additional help to carry out your risk assessment, including examples can be found here. Don’t forget to make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Choose a safe area to do your litter pick. You’ll need an area away from any roads or steep banks, for example. Don’t forget to tell parents and carers if young people will need to meet at (or be picked up from) somewhere different.
• Use your risk assessment to help identify any other hazards, such as sharp objects. Make sure you include any more unusual hazards too. Make sure you’ll have enough adult supervision for the activity and don’t forget to plan how you’ll safely clean items so you can recycle them. An adult might need to do the cleaning.
• Tell everyone to wear suitable clothing and footwear. Make sure you have suitable gloves that will protect everyone’s hands – work or gardening gloves are ideal.
• If you’re planning a bigger litter pick and need to borrow some equipment, you could get in touch with your local council – they’ll often lend items to groups.
• If you spot a big problem that’s causing damage or danger to the environment, you should report it on the Government website.

What do we waste?

1. Everyone should think back to their day. Did they create any waste? What did they do with it? People use a lot of things in their daily lives, so they often end up creating a lot of waste.

2. Hopefully everyone made sure they put their rubbish in a bin and recycled it or kept it to reuse if they could. Can anyone share an example of something they recycled or have kept to reuse?
3. Everyone should talk about how some people aren’t responsible with their rubbish. Not everyone makes the effort to find the nearest bin or take it home – some people leave or drop their rubbish, and it becomes litter in the environment. Sometimes people drop litter accidentally, and sometimes it’s blown from bins that are too full.

Get litter hunting

1. It’s time to explore. Everyone should collect the things they’ll need for their litter pick and think of any ways they want to organise what they find.  

2. The person leading the activity should make sure that everyone knows how to keep themselves safe on the litter pick by going through some safety tips below.
3. The person leading the activity should make sure that everyone knows any boundaries for the activity. How far can they explore? When should they come back as a group?

4. Everyone should get stuck in to litter picking.

5. While everyone’s litter picking (or once they’ve finished), they talk about what harm the litter may have caused if it was left where they found it.

What did you find?

1. Everyone should come back together and reflect on what they found. Did they find lots of any particular type of litter? Were there any unusual items? What material was the litter made of?

2. Everyone should organise the litter they’ve collected and recycle anything they can. Are there any items that could be reused once they’ve been thoroughly cleaned?

3. Someone should clean the items that can be recycled.

4. Everyone should wash their hands thoroughly.