September 2011 Autumn fun

September is a big month for Keep Wales Tidy, traditionally incorporating Tidy Wales Week. The month started with a clean up of the upper end of the Roath Brook before it enters the lake from Roath Wild Gardens. Often some of this rubbish just ends up in the lake.

The Cardiff Friday Mornings Environmental Project (CFMEP) had a decent turn out and managed to handsort through the blockage to the grill and rescued 34 bags of rubbish of which 4 were recyclables. Slideshow
Later in the month we constructed a small herb spiral and soft fruit garden with raspberries, red currants and 4-apple trees near Canton Community Centre. Loads of groups were involved in this and has hopefully saved another patch of green space in Canton from being subject to tarmac landscaping. This was a Wild Weekend project and was paid for by John Lewis.

This article was published by the Echo and includes a great picture of one of the toddlers tap dancing a bluebell in the ground.
Slideshow
I had a great event with Cardiff Rivers Group which involved a clean up in the Dock feeder right next to Cardiff Castle. This stream is very important for controlling water levels and comes from the taff next to Blackweir Bridge and comes around Bute Park and exits by the castle. There is a grill there which stops some rubbish and wood debris from being washed downstream. The grill had been raised, but luckily, the water levels were so high that most of the water was higher than the arch so it was a case of scooping off most of the rubbish, move the wood out of the way. I don’t normally go out with CRG as they are a sustainable and competent group, but the risks on this event were higher so I came along to aid Dave King on this day. We collected a mass of bags and tonnes of waste. For a slideshow see here

In TWW we did 3 great events with Llanrumney High, Glan yr Avon Primary (Llanrumney) and Windsor Clive Primary school in Ely. Altogether with these 3 schools we collected over 50 bags of rubbish.
We did a lovely event with the travel and tourism department of Cardiff & Vale College where we collected 15 bags of rubbish and 513 cig butts (the smoking litter was around the reception area of the college). For a slideshow see here
We did a great little event with Llanedeyrn Playcentre where is about 1 hour we pulled out 6 bags of rubbish and pulled up a new stand of Himalayan balsam. For pics see here
We rounded off TWW with a great event in Chapel Wood where we have done a load of work in the past with businesses, and especially St. Philip Evans Primary School. We were lucky to have Jenny Rathbone AM to be out with us as well as a group from BT. Jenny contacted us as she wished to take part in Tidy Wales Week and this seemed like a great event to have her help out. We collected 23 rubbish bags, 14 recycling bags and around a tonne of extra material. Parks’ Waste services were on hand to take the rubbish away almost immediately. Slideshow here