9 of us ditched pancake day in favour of helping the Canal & River Trust clean up a section of tow path near Hanger Lane!

With the threat of rain and the lure of freshly flipped pancakes I think lots of people decided to stay home last night but not our hardy bunch! We kicked things off with a chat about our favourite pancake toppings (naturally) and a round up of the news.

Last month’s heroes

• Jenni completed the most deeds for a second month running, who will cat h her in March?!
• Our newest member Hayley racked up a whopping 293km in February (and it’s a short month!), making her distance queen for the month.
• I did the most cheering on the website which quite frankly should be the case, you guys do some great stuff that deserves the kudos! Remember to log on and do the same this month!

Upcoming weekend GoodGyming

• This Saturday there's a mission to help plant trees at a community garden in Southall, at the moment we only have one person signed up, so please get involved if you can! Sign up and see all the information here.
• On Saturday 30th March we have a special WWF Earth Hour night time trail run and litter pick on Horsenden Hill. It's going to be a really great night and a totally different experience to sick your teeth into. Sign up here to get involved!
• After an amazingly successful first visit to City Harvest last weekend we are now setting this up as a monthly activity. Sign up now to help this surplus food charity continue their great work, the next date is on 6th April.

The route wasn't pancake flat...

So onto the task! After our 2 mile run up and over the hills of Ealing we arrived at the section of canal we know is sadly notorious for rubbish. Our focus for the evening was recycling as although there is so much other litter we’d be there all day if we didn’t try to focus on one problem! We split into teams each collecting a different recyclable, we had two teams on cans, one on plastics and one on glass.

How much CAN we handle?

Cans we definitely the worst offender and we soon filled up 5 full bags of just cans! We initially started counting our findings but towards the end they were coming thick and fast so we lost tally. We counted over 100 into the first bag so I think we can safely assume we had close to 500 cans in total, absolutely shocking! Along with a full bag of plastic bottles and another bag of glass we made just a small dent in what needs to be done in the area. It’s really quite sad to see and we’ll be presenting our findings to the Canal and River Trust so we can work with them and the council to come up with a solution, this can’t keep happening!

Working with West London Waste we had an agreed spot to leave our collections in so that they could be recycled in the correct way and we left feeling like we’d hopefully made a positive impression on the area. A cycle commuter stopped on his way to see what we were doing and thanked us for what we were doing, it’s things like that that make it worth while!