We would like to thank all of you who came out for the morning to help us clean up the village on Saturday 17th January. We had a good turnout – 19 people took part in the cleanup and enjoyed the BBQ afterwards.

We collected 24 black sacks of rubbish. You might conclude from this that we villagers of Oldbury are an untidy lot. But Oldbury Clean Team members were surprised to find that, of the 24 sacks worth collected, 15 were recovered not from Oldbury itself but from the approaches to the village. This suggests that people throw litter out of their car windows as they approach Oldbury or as they leave. On the other hand, we collected 5 sacks of litter from the playing fields so we are hoping that we can reduce the amount of rubbish dropped there in the future.

Janet Astle, co-founder of Oldbury Clean Team, commented : “The good news is that the village itself isn’t that badly littered. But we now know that it’s the lanes leading into the village that we’ve got to look after and we must try to get the message across to people that it simply isn’t acceptable to throw litter from their cars once they’re away from the village. Picked Moor Lane, which we regard as Oldbury’s gateway, was filthy and Oldbury Clean Team members will now be on the look-out for people throwing litter from their cars outside the village”.