49 members of Oldbury Clean Team and Thornbury Sailing Club took part in their second Severn Riverbank Cleanup on Saturday afternoon. It was fascinating to see what had been washed up on the bank since the last cleanup in September 2008 – loads of driftwood (including several pallets and a wooden picnic table), a huge blue buoy, an aluminium beer keg, a fire extinguisher, a traffic cone, a plastic baker’s tray, a sign for boat trips that had floated down from Stourport, 3 wheels and the bumper and plastic fascia from a car and the usual assortment of plastic containers and pieces. One of the more intriguing items, following the discovery of the front end of a canoe in September, was a broken canoe paddle. Were the two connected ?

Janet Astle, co-founder of Oldbury Clean Team, commented : “We thought that we had cleaned up the riverbank pretty well in September last year and we were a bit apprehensive about whether it was worth having another go at it 6 months later. Sadly, we needn’t have worried. We collected 47 sacks of litter (compared with 51 last time) and we amassed a huge pile of driftwood and other rubbish. It seems pretty clear that Oldbury is on the receiving end of all the rubbish that everyone else upstream chucks in the river – when you think that the River Severn rises in mid Wales and then flows down through Shrewsbury and Kidderminster, there is plenty of scope for people’s discarded items to end up on our riverbank.”

The cleanup was carried out as part of South Glos Council’s Big Spring Clean campaign.