No more spring cleans - ever?

Image by Jan Bella. Words by Rach Coleman.

It probably makes sense to begin where we did.

It was January - the wild winter raged outside our home offices and made our team’s ritual of asking ‘have you been outside today?’ all the more important. We were still finalising plans for the year, figuring out exactly when and how to share with our community the updates we’ve made to our Trash Survey (more on this on Friday!).

April had become a bit of a sticking point. It’s the month that has held, for 6 years at TFT, but for almost 40 years here in the UK, an annual ‘Spring Clean’ campaign. That turn-of-the-clocks rallying cry to head out and remove as much single-use pollution as we can find.

And we love it - don’t get me wrong. Spring has always been a favourite for us and our community. That opportunity to emerge from winter together in a purposeful and uniting way is incredibly powerful. We have never not loved our Spring Clean.

But our team has cumulatively done over 30 years of spring cleaning - and at some point after you’ve done something 30 times over, it would perhaps be odd to not ask ourselves:

WHY ARE WE STILL DOING THIS?

Image by Jan Bella

Global plastic production is continuing to rise. As we highlighted in November’s edition of the State of Our Trails Report, though policies are coming in to tackle single-use pollution - they are not living up to the principles they’re founded on and don’t go far enough to prevent the literal trash we find on our trails.

Meanwhile the brands we find polluting the places we love remain, in many respects, outside the lines of responsibility - they’re profits continue to rise, with little to no efforts made to give back to the places their packaging ends up in.

We have discussed in the past going on ‘strike’ from what litter picking organisation’s the world over consider their biggest and busiest campaign before. But we’ve always ran into the problem that we love spring cleaning, and we know our volunteers do too.

But in that dark and dismal January, a new idea started brewing: what if we encouraged our volunteers to harness their energy, motivation and desire for action to do something different on our behalf in April?

Image by Sam Dugon

So this will, well and truly, be our final Spring Clean campaign. Our volunteers will continue to host events all year round, and we’re still cooking exactly what 2027 and beyond will hold - but we’re excited to share our ideas with you when we get there. We know it’ll focus on our new research on the human impacts of trail cleaning, celebrating how powerful the single yet meaningful act of removing trash is for our sense of connection to the world around us.

And it wouldn’t be TFT if we didn’t go out with a bang would it?! So for this, our final Spring Clean year, our amazing community of A-TEAMers and Community Hubs have rallied together to host dozens of cleans across the UK that you can join in with. Head along to hear directly from our community why taking a more critical approach to Spring Cleans is important to us - as well as prizes, snacks, dogs, laps round pump tracks and more!

No Spring Clean near you? Nay bother - head out on your own and share your findings with us to contribute. Our Trash Surveys have had some VERY EXCITING updates, and we’re excited to hear what you think!

We’ll never stop trail cleaning - but we think we should use our voice, the voice of our community, to do it a little differently. What do you think?