This Marks The Beginning of the End | Introducing the 2026 State of Our Trails Report
Photo by Joby Newson. Words by Rach Coleman.
This year's State of Our Trails Report opens with perhaps one of the most significant statements we've ever made:
We are on the edge of huge transformation for not just our wild places, but ecosystems everywhere.
What makes this so significant for us is that it's not clickbait or a shot in the dark - we're not those kind of folks. We're too nerdy about trash to make statements without backing them up with data.
What's been remarkable as we've brought this year's State of Our Trails Report to life, is how true this statement is. We knew early on that 25% of the trash our volunteers record and remove are single-use drinks containers, which come October 1st 2027 will be captured by the UK's new Deposit Return Scheme (DRS). Given the success of schemes all over the world, but most recently Re-Turn in Ireland, we were confident our DRS could take on this significant wedge of the trash pie.
But it was only when our amazing Data Manager Heather began running our dataset - almost 750,000 individually and meticulously recorded items of single-use pollution, covering 20,000km of trails - that we knew how much of that trash wedge, that 25%, we'd be able to eradicate.
It'd be easy to drop all the cool stats here - but I'm bias in that I want you to read the Report, so if you're a fellow trash nerd and you want the deep dive, head to the SoOT page here.
Instead what I'd like to celebrate here, as we release this year's State of Our Trails Report into the wild and see all the efforts of our team be received by our volunteers, peers and change makers, is how powerful citizen science can be.
It's something I knew nothing about, nearly 5 years ago when I joined the team. I was never science-y growing up, never good with spreadsheets or numbers - I always thought it best left to the smart folks who look heckin' cool in labcoats. But through the almost 10,000 volunteers who contribute now daily to our dataset, by doing trail cleans, trash counts, tagging us on Instagram I've come to understand that science isn't only for everyone, but it's most meaningful in the hands of everyday folk. The dog walkers and flow riders, the technical trail runners and the round the block walkers - those who are deeply familiar with the places they ride, run and roam in.
When we all don the metaphorical white labcoat, we become not only stewards of our trails, but citizens committed to evidence-based action. We are nature connectors and spark makers, not only driven by our love for these places, but the knowledge that we can do better by them. The Deposit Return Scheme is how we start.
We hope you're ready for transformation - and we hope you're just as excited to keep submitting trash data, and watch the line on our graphs begin to drop, until there are days when we can ride, run or roam without encountering single-use pollution.
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