Underground, overground, Wombling free
The Wombles of Leicestershire villages are we
Making good use of the things that we find
Things that the everyday folks leave behind
* with apologies to Mike Batt
Rotary Novus President-Elect Sarita Shah became a Womble for a morning. She joined 11 members of the South Leicestershire Litter Wombles clearing streets in South Wigston of litter.
Together, they collected more than 30 bags of litter, including several hundred aluminium cans. These will join the thousands of others the volunteer litter-pickers have passed through the Rotary Club to the charity Helipads for Hospitals.
Sarita and Jim Matthews, who has been co-ordinating the club’s effort, wanted to get involved as a gesture of thanks to the Wombles who have collected hundreds of bags since forming at the end of February 2019.
At the same time that Sarita and her friends were clearing Gloucester Crescent, Cornwall Road, Kenilworth Road and part of Saffron Road, three other Wombles groups were also busy. In total they collected more than 75 bags of rubbish. To read more, visit their Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/604107836721038/ posts on December 7, 2019.
Sarita and Jim agreed that the Wombles certainly live up to their motto: “Action Not Words”.
What shocked and disappointed them more than anything was the quantity of dog mess which dog owners bagged and then discarded on the public footways. At one location someone had stuffed a dozen bags of dog mess into a standard litter bin until the bottom of the bin dropped, spilling the mess across the pavement.
The biggest individual item was a powered treadmill abandoned near the Fairfield pub, where the group had started and finished their wombling ramble.
When the cans collected in over the weekend of December 7-8 are crushed and weighed, they will be taken to Stocken Prison, Rutland, where they will be crushed into bales ready to be smelted into the raw material to create a helipad for air ambulance helicopters taking patients to Leicester Royal Infirmary.
If you want to help contribute to the Helipads for Hospitals project, please e-mail us at RotaryClubofLeicesterNovus@gmail.com
Last edited: 21:45 on Saturday, 07.12.2019
