Mel and I joined a small army of Final Straw volunteers to litter-pick the Tipner shore line at low tide.

While we nattered and caught up on our news, we filled our bag and bucket twice over, collecting mainly small pieces of plastic, polystyrene & fishing line.

Many of the other volunteers were still beach-cleaning along the full stretch of the shore as we completed our two-hour stint. But even as we left, there were already loads of full bin bags of rubbish and recycling.

Such a satisfying task! Final Straw will be repeating this one again soon, with a skip to collect the large pieces of debris.

because the sea-weed.

Team GG headed to the beach to give it a good clean.

The standard array of rubbish was found: pants, socks and a hat made for a lovely new outfit.

I found a nice little crab friend and the swans with new baby thanked us as we left.

Laura and mimi GG-er Jack were experts in keeping their wellies on in the unexpected deep areas! and the short showers were very unwelcome!

A nice new hubcap, a few vapes and a very rusty paintcan. And Yvonne got her GG recruitment head on whilst picking all the microplastics out of the seaweed!

Wait? thats star trek right? 🚀 Well the quote fits our adventure!

Jane and I joined the final straw beach clean in Eastney this morning to celebrate May the 4th (be with you, and with you). We started in the usual places, clearing the small bits of plastic on the beach and the stinky dog poo bag and then headed 'to the dark side' (over the road). We managed to take a (not) shortcut into a lovely muddy area, no rolled ankles luckily...

After getting back to the path and a short battle with a bag we had the interesting finds of a lantern and the classic one sock. Having collected a good haul we headed back to base to hand in the finds for the final straw team to sort into recyclables.

Sinéad, Abby, Jane and I collected loads of rubbish on the forgotten Eastney beach, as part of Billie's Final Straw beach clean. There was such a lot of washed-up plastic, fishing line and pieces of metal.

Despite the biting cold wind, the many volunteers took advantage of the winter sun to collect bags and bags of rubbish. It was a satisfying way to celebrate my own personal milestone of 500 good deeds.

I joined about 20 volunteers including health professionals, Councillors and school pupils at The Hard for a massive litter pick.

After only an hour, we'd cleared a big pile of cigarette butts and some other litter. It looks much nicer now and hopefully people will use the new ballot butt bins and answer the age-old question, does pineapple belong on pizza.

Oh, we do love a collection task at GoodGym Portsmouth! Raiding our homes for things that someone else can re-purpose.

In this case, it was:

47 loo roll & kitchen roll tubes; 7 cereal boxes; 19 egg boxes; 14 shoe boxes; 22 plastic tubs; and 45 other boxes of all shapes and sizes (I think!)

The Final Straw Youth Eco-Conference will use these somehow - maybe an experimental biomass project, or a huge sculptural representation of waste, or a working replica of a wind farm. Who knows? But I bet they'll learn lots and have fun doing it.