I have done litter picks before, but never a Big Hog Friendly litter pick! Myself and a volunteer team of staff and students at De Montfort University (DMU) were all really excited to do our bit to make our campus a safer place for our endangered prickly friends.
First things first, we needed our litter pickers, so we donned our florescent jackets, put on our gloves and reached into a box filled with litter pickers to collect our rubbish collection tools. I am convinced that passers by looked on in envy as they walked by the posy of florescent robot armed hedgehog volunteers!
We were ready to get going, some of us were eagerly pressing on the triggers of the litter pickers whilst eying up potential litter hot spots on campus. However, we needed a game plan before we got going, so we split ourselves into 4 teams, Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, and we would split up into four different sections across the campus to collect discarded items on the floor.
Here’s where we divided and conquered:
When collecting litter across campus, we found ourselves in awe of our incredible cleaning team at the university. The pavements, walkways and cycleways were pristine, a thing of beauty actually! It was not until we dived into the bushes and the little used corners of the university did we find a plethora of rubbish to be harvested, packed up and discarded.
After an hour of highly enjoyable and therapeutic rubbish collecting, we reconvinced at the campus centre to compare our loot and share stories. I stood there smugly with my ¾ full bag of carefully collected litter, but the smug look of cleaning superiority was quickly wiped off my face as one by one, the big hog friendly volunteers returned with bags filled to the rim with rubbish! It was abundantly clear that everyone took the challenge very seriously.
I would recommend getting involved in the Big Hog Friendly Litter Pick to absolutely everyone. It was a super fun and rewarding hour of cleaning up our community for our hedgehogs and biodiversity as a whole. It was really heart warming to see just how proud the whole team was to have collected so much litter from campus, 10 whole bags to be exact, and I would recommend getting involved in the Big Hog Friendly Litter Pick to anyone.
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De Montfort University
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