Volunteers in Fife pick up over 17,000 face masks in 2021
The group say they picked up over 33,000 in just 15 months
Last updated 6th Jan 2022
A group of volunteers in Fife, known as Fife street champions group, have been making an effort to clean up their area.
In doing so the group picked up 17,551 discarded face masks in 2021 and 33,556 over the past 15 months.
They began to count the number of masks collected on the 18th of September when they joined a week long litter pick from the Marine Conservation Society and have since kept track.
More than 2,000 of the over 33,000 thousand collected have been reusable masks.
Sharon Longhurst is one of the groups admins and she says the amount of masks they have picked up is 'staggering'. She said: "It's just staggering and It's just so sad that people are doing it. They're just being dropped wherever. We find them in trees, just hanging in trees, so people have deliberately hung them in a tree.
"We find them in gutters and road verges. Of course if they're in the gutter, what happens when it rains is they get washed down the drain and then they end up in the sea. Mainly retail areas and high schools are particularly bad."
She added that the group have already picked up hundreds this year, saying: "An hour ago I counted up and we're on 369 just for this year already and that's from about 20 people litter picking."
Sharon says the discarded masks are a concern, not only due to Covid-19 transmission but also their impact on the environment and wildlife. She said: "It's catastrophic for marine life, the wildlife and birds getting entangled. I just don't understand why people are still doing it."
She's urging people to take responsibility and dispose of their masks correctly, saying: "It's not just one mask, it's the sheer extent of the numbers, you're contributing to that. That one mask that you drop could be the mask that entangles part of our wildlife or an animal. We've got to take responsibility for our own litter. It's nobody else's problem."
Sharon believes the total number of masks collected in Fife is actually higher than the over 33,000 her group have collected. She said: "Well there will be more than that in Fife because that is just what our members are picking up. It isn't the council pickers and anybody else that isn't in our group. We do have a lot of other people that do litter picking that aren't actually in our group."
With people being encouraged to take lateral flow tests before socialising, Sharon says there is also a problem in the area with the tests being littered. She said: "Especially in woodlands near high schools. I think they're just issued to the kids and we've found big piles of them. They've all been taken out of their packets so we get all the packaging, we get the lateral flow test, we get everything to do with them."
