Newcastle Beauty Spots Drown in Litter Over Easter Weekend

Newcastle Beauty Spots Drown in Litter Over Easter Weekend

Hands up who had a lovely day out a local beauty spot over the gorgeous bank holiday weekend? Did you do your bit and bin your litter, or take it home with you?

Well residents near a popular beauty spot in Newcastle are angry that plenty of people who visited the beautiful Jesmond Dene in the city didn’t take their litter home and left the place looking a mess.

Jesmond Dene is popular with tourists, dog walkers and families, and as usual, many people descended on it over the weekend when the sun started shining. But sadly, they left plastic and food waste everywhere, and residents were left angry about the council’s apparent slow response.

One man said that the council had recently removed bins from the park, so people just drop litter on the ground. He added that the council should have provided extra wheelie bins for over the bank holiday weekend.

Litter doesn’t just look awful, it’s harmful

A local Green Party candidate said she was jogging through the park on Easter Saturday, and saw litter accumulating and bins overflowing. She added that litter doesn’t just look awful, it can pose a risk to children, pets, and wildlife, and it can find its way into waterways and wash out to sea, spoiling the coast too.

Newcastle City Council has an online portal where people can report litter problems, and it showed that half of the bins in Jesmond Dene and nearby Heaton Park had been reported as full by Tuesday afternoon.

Bank holiday weekends are a ‘strain on resources’

A council spokesperson said that council staff empty the bins on behalf of the Parks Trust and added that sunny bank holiday weekends always put a strain on resources. The council confirmed that crews had been out to empty the bins and clear away any other rubbish.

The council recently launched an anti-litter campaign to spread the message that keeping the city clean was everyone’s job, not just the council’s. It’s urging people to take their waste home if they can see that bins are already full to avoid more situations like the one at Jesmond Dene.

It wasn’t just the North East’s parks that took a battering from litter either, as the sunny weekend saw people flock to local beaches. In Whitley Bay in North Tyneside, volunteers carried out a litter pick to clean up the mess that was left after the bank holiday.

A spokesperson for North Tyneside council said that it had planned ahead for the good weather, and brought in extra cleansing staff who worked all weekend to deal with the extra litter. She added that the council wanted to remind people to be considerate as there are plenty of bins available and there’s no excuse for litter.