Damien Gabet has cycled 22 days across England in the shape of a giant Lucozade bottle, while collecting litter from trails.
Originally setting off from his home town of Margate (you can view the full route here), he finished at the Camp Wildfire Festival.
The journey saw a total of 2,484 bottles picked and counted.
Dubbed ‘The Lu-crusade’, the effort was all about tackling trail trash with a bit of creativity. With plastic bottles making up a third of countryside litter, and Lucozade the most commonly found branded item, hence the bottle-shaped route. (it feels like it’s more cans of Monster than anything else around STW HQ)
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Raising awareness for Trash Free Trails, the bottles picked on his adventure will be submitted as data to their the State of Our Trails Report.
Along the journey, Damien interviewed experts and enthusiasts involved in tackling this issue – from Lucozade’s head of sustainability, Fraser Macintosh, to Sarah Parry, a world champion litter picker.
With the UK spending over £1 billion a year cleaning up litter, and a long-delayed Deposit Return Scheme still years from full rollout, the Lu-Crusade aims to push the issue into public view.
This is excellent.
When I started cycle-touring a few years back I was utterly dismayed and disappointed by the roadside litter which you wouldn’t notice in a car, even / especially in the remote Scottish highlands and islands. I often wondered about doing something similar while riding, but it would take days and days to cover one day’s worth of normal riding if stopping to pick up rubbish.
If I was going to do it, I’d do it in the shape of a Red Bull.
A couple of years ago when Snake Pass was closed for an extended period of time due to landslides, the local cycle club went up and did litter picks. Even with several of them doing it over the course of several weeks, they didn’t come close to clearing all of it but they did make a hell of a difference. And in the layby at the reservoir end, there must have been 40+ large industrial black bags filled with roadside crap. Mostly fast food wrappers, cans and bottles, a fair bit of car debris like broken headlights, hub caps etc and very occasionally an energy bar or gel wrapper. The vast majority was from drivers.
I even noticed it a lot more in Gran Canaria the last time I was there (2023 maybe). One of the main tourist routes up to Pico, the high point of the island. Roadside drainage channels filled with food and drink waste mostly. Utter disgrace. Way worse than when I’d first been to the place in about 2017/18.
Some on here might remember the litter pick I organised on the cycle paths of North Edinburgh back in 2009/10. I got funding for a bike trailer, thinking it would be a nice touch to carry the bags of litter (i.e. thinking it would carry the 3 or 4 bags we’d collect). The council collected and weighed the rubbish collected – 3 tonnes.
Edit: not one upmanship, just the sheer unappreciable scale of the problem.
Winter once the leaves are off the hedges and undergrowth has died back is a good time to reveal & pick the litter, there are a couple of spots near us where I recon somebody must lob a can in the ditch every single day as they drive past. 😕
I’d guess about 50% of the litter around where I live is John Smiths and Bud Lite cans. Worryingly, I suspect most of it will come out of cars.
There was a disappointing number of gel wrappers dropped at Dalby during the gravel eventÂ
This is without doubt a “thing". noted examples:
– 100 Red Bull cans in a 1 mile stretch in Shetland
– 2 bin liners full of the same 35cl vodka bottle in a ~300m local stretch. No pavement, must be out of a car window (again, worryingly).
I know its never that easy logistically, legally, morally, but my simple mind says use prisoner labour to tidy the place up!
I can’t help but wonder whether the stat about Lucozade bottles being the commonest branded litter comes from research funded by Red Bull or Monster…
tbh shouldve done it in the shape of a penisÂ
would’ve got more lclicks and could run with the tagline ‘only dicks drop litter’
Swansea Iron Man was the same. Â The amount of litter was beyond belief.Â
I remember in the Battle on the Beach that the organisers said that if you were caught littering you’d get disqualified.  Yet when I drafted the elite riders up the beach as they lapped me (easy place to refuel) several dropped wrappers without a thought.
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Could do a McDonalds hamburger from Wales to East Anglia.
Random find of the day: Google maps can’t find East Anglia.Â