The University of Stirling’s Marine Conservation Society is hosting weekly litter picks to tackle waste of campus.
Keeping Stirling’s campus clean is important to keeping the marine life from any harm. Society President Lucy Wilson spoke to Brig about the project.
This new project was started by the society in collaboration with a few others.
“Our main focus is obviously the environment, but we also have the loch, so we want to keep a lot of the rubbish out of the loch so that there is no marine life that’s eating any of this rubbish.
“So far, we have picked up 12kg of rubbish and that has just been from a month of doing these litter picks. It shows there is definitely an issue with the fact there is so much rubbish.
“We have also found there is definitely not enough bins whilst we are doing the litter picks so there is a lot of cigarette butts that are dropped around the campus because there is no cigarette bins in busy places.”
“Cigarette butts is the most common [type of litter found]. There is also a lot of vapes that are left around as well but most of these things are being found around buildings with classrooms and accommodation block especially, they seem to have a lot of cigarette butts.”
“I definitely think that would help out a lot if people were maybe just more aware of where they can bins these things because a lot of bins are just in random little places so not really in busy places. So, I think maybe putting the bins is a more obvious place would help.”
The project was made possible by the Vice Chancellors Fund, Lucy said: “It [the equipment] obviously cost a bit of money. Our society wouldn’t have been able to fund that, so we managed to use the funding to buy all the equipment.”
The equipment is currently stored in the Green and Blue Space where any student can sign out and use it when they want. Lucy said for the weekly litter picks however that “we are happy for people just to show up. We normally meet on the bridge over the loch at 11 am every Saturday.”
If you want to know more or get involved with the litter picks you can contact the Marine Conservation Society for more details.
Feature Image Credit: Ciara Tait
Lifestyle Editor / Third year journalism student
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