The Mountain Riders environmental group has issued a report on its annual spring cleaning activities across French and now British ski areas and note that 3,500 volunteers turned out to clean up the slopes of 55 participating ski resorts collecting in total 30 tonnes of waste from the ski slopes, 56% of it recyclable, 57% of it left by tourists.
"Once again, volunteers responded to our annual call to keep our mountains clean and showed up in force for the annual spring-cleaning sessions organised in the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Vosges, the Massif Central and also in the UK with the Ski Club of Great-Britain. Many thanks go not only to these volunteers, but also to those who organised these positive actions." said Stewart Sheppard of Mountain Riders.
The number of volunteers was up by 1000 on last winter which Mountain Riders believe is clear proof that raising awareness is key in getting people involved.
The amount of waste collected was nearly doubles last years total of 17 tonnes with rubbish collectors still finding large amounts of older pieces of rubbish in and around the resorts and on the slopes.
As always, this year's spring clean yielded an interesting combination of rubbish, including cans, plastic wrappers, single-use products, bottles, paper, batteries, metal and cables, PET bottles and the ever-present cigarette butts.
The sheer quantity of cigarette butts received special mention in the report with up to 30 000 cigarette butts can be found under just one chairlift.
The idea of Mountain Riders' campaign is both to clean up the slopes and raise awareness of the harm littering does with the aim of ensuring that leaving rubbish on the slopes becomes a thing of the past.
"It is vital for everybody to bring their own rubbish back down from the mountains then take their rubbish to the closest sorting bins." Said Mr Sheppard.
"To take things further, we can all try to choose products supplied in packaging that can be easily re-used or recycled and where possible products that have little or no packaging at all."
www.mountain-riders.org
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