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Richmond Park : Ham CommonRideLondon litter up 90% in Richmond Park
Litter left by RideLondon 100 riders in Richmond Park is up 90 per cent on last year, according to a local conservation charity, which has reiterated warnings about the lethal effect of litter on deer.
Friends of Richmond Park say they found 182 gel wrappers and opening strips in just 600m of the 100 mile course, 24 hours after July 31 when 27,000 amateur riders and professional cyclists passed through.
Event organisers, who admitted there had been a communication issue with litter patrol teams after this year's event, said they may install cameras on the route next year to identify and ban those who litter.
Chilterns cyclists asked to clean up their act
Friends of Richmond Park trustee, Richard Gray, told Your Local Guardian litter can have serious long-term consequences for deer: “They swallow the plastic and if they eat enough it can stop them digesting other food.
“We’re not anti-cyclist, but we wonder why they have to throw the packets on the floor; why can’t they tuck them into their lycra?
“They blow onto the grass, which make them hard to see for litter-pickers.
“We just don’t want them to get into the deer and preventing them from eating.”
Event director, Hugh Brasher, said next year there will be a dedicated litter clean-up team, who will do one pick after the amateur event, and one after the professional cyclists have passed through.
He told the paper there will be cameras in secret locations throughout the park to catch and ban riders who ignore the event’s anti-littering message.
Mr Brasher said: “We have done an enormous amount of messaging through our #LoveWhereYouRide campaign, which calls on riders to take home any rubbish with them from training rides and to use the waste facilities provided throughout the Prudential Ride London event.
“We have suggested a meeting and dialogue with Friends of Richmond Park.”
#Lovewhereyouride and BIN your litter! https://t.co/UXnuP1kI6Z
— RideLondon (@RideLondon) August 2, 2015
Last year litter pickers found 96 gel wrappers in 600m of the RideLondon course. Of the 100 mile course 6.1km runs through the Park on the outward leg, before heading for the Surrey Hills and back to Central London. The Friends say littering was a problem the year before.
Of course, some participants proudly take their wrappers home with them.
Took all my wrappers home. @RideLondon #proveit #LoveWhereYouRide #RideLondon pic.twitter.com/zZo9yy1c0O
— Steve Castle (@stevecastle) July 31, 2016
Laura Laker is a freelance journalist with more than a decade’s experience covering cycling, walking and wheeling (and other means of transport). Beginning her career with road.cc, Laura has also written for national and specialist titles of all stripes. One part of the popular Streets Ahead podcast, she sometimes appears as a talking head on TV and radio, and in real life at conferences and festivals. She is also the author of Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network.
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66 comments
The Etape this year, among others, had a great solution - they had sections of road that were drop zones. Fantastic idea. You drop out of the zone, you're disqualified, within the zone, it'll get swept up during the day.
Who needs gels anyway? Just amateurs bimbling around a pretty course, they're hardly in glycogen debt crisis! I stopped using energy drinks and gels years ago, get by with water in my bottles and a bit of soreen in my back pocket.
I guess some people just like to fantasise that they're in a race.
Exactly. As someone said recently, you can get all the energy contained in a large handful of gels in about 30 pence worth of maltodextrin and make your own in a 150-200ml bottle.
A massive marketing coupe to pull in the gullible and those with more money than sense.
I saw several cyclists over the course of 100miles blatantly throwing their empty gel/food wrappers on the ground. Thoroughly disgusting behaviour.
tucking into the gels by the time you get to richmond park? have a word!
No excuse for littering deliberately either!
Or culled
The prevalence of gels and energy foods says a lot for the advertising selling these products, but not much for the knowledge of the people using them. I bet they were all wearing helmets too.
Honestly, the gullibility of the average human seems to be rising, not falling. Or perhaps the advertising industry has got better. Whatever. As H. L. Mencken said “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Excluding the nationality issue, so very true of this country too.
Probably, as you cannot start the event without one...
Maybe they should throw them away onto the roadside verges too!
Which is why I will never enter an event which mandates helmets, as the organisers are clearly incompetent.
Leaving aside how difficult it must be for you to find an event to participate/compete in, it doesn't mean that the organisers are incompetent. More likely it means that the insurance they have procured compels them to require participants to wear helmets. Which - if my understanding of the insurance market is correct - means that people are betting real money that wearing a helmet is likely to reduce the cost of injury.
As an aside, do all threads have a kind of "half life" after which they descend into a futile debate about either disc brakes in the pro peleton or he wearing of helmets?
Leaving aside how difficult it must be for you to find an event to participate/compete in, it doesn't mean that the organisers are incompetent. More likely it means that the insurance they have procured compels them to require participants to wear helmets. Which - if my understanding of the insurance market is correct - means that people are betting real money that wearing a helmet is likely to reduce the cost of injury.
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There are plenty of events run by competent people who have some knowledge of cycling and risk which do not mandate helmets.
The insurance myth is one I've heard dozens of times, with the organisers claiming that "it ain't us guv, it's the insurance company". Except that every time I've checked with the insurance company, they say that they have made no such stipulation, but then, in their business, they understand data and statistics, unlike many event organisers. Not only are the organisers incompetent, they're not even very good at lying.
Sorry, but your understanding is wrong, and insurance companies know very well that cycle helmets have no beneficial effects.
Etape Caledonia and many other sportives have dedicated litter drop zones, usually lasting about 100 yards out of a feed station. They're manned by people with grabbers and bin bags so nothing's left behind. Simple and sensible idea and you keep your trash until you reach one. Ride London has the resources to do this quite easily.
Theres a simple solution to this, for those that have don't want to be accidental litter louts. Get one of those little 150-200ml plastic hip flasks for runners and pour your gels in to that before the ride. Fits easily in a jersey pocket, and is easier and safer than faffing with sachets when riding in a tight group, plus no chance of accidentally dropping litter. Just need to avoid the temptation to neck it all in one go!
It's true that Friends of Richmond Park never miss a chance to criticise people for cycling (whilst denying that of course). They're not exactly alone in that club of "Friends of" groups.
Must give a special mention to the Friends of Southwark Park, who seem to have a problem with the equality act. There response to queries about this was to block people and call them trolls.
In my experience, the "Friends of..." type groups exist to help *their* friends. They like to try and turn public spaces into semi-private spaces for "the right sort".
"Local parks for local people; there's nothing for you here ".
My experience of Friends groups is the opposite. Their aspirations and efforts may for the parks (what they think is "best") will be conditioned by their own background/outlook (disproportionately older, white, middle-class?) but they are giving up their time to help others and keeping the local authority (usually the park's owners) on their toes.
Community politics can get nasty though, so these groups do need to be monitored.
I live within 1km of the route in Surrey (so don't do it - just go down to cheer on those that do every year), and, piqued by the reddit about this yesterday, rode the route from Leatherhead to Esher today looking for litter. Among the discarded nappies, bits of plastic, paper, cars, bottles, fag packets, fizzy drink cans etc it was hard to see any gel wrappers. Maybe the deer (of which there are numbers round here outside the Royal Parks) had eaten them all. Or maybe the clean-up squads only removed the wrappers.
So I'm with surly_by_name, and thereverent on this one.
Couldn't agree more that wilful littering is shameful and should be stamped out. I slot my empties up the leg of my bibs or down the front of my jersey, they sit flat and it's no hassle.
However, I thought the amount of litter dropped this year was much, much less than in 2014. The hill on the way out of Kingston past a station (Norbiton?) was littered before, none this year.
Curious about this... "there had been a communication issue with litter patrol teams"... is that the sort of 'communication issue' that results in them not doing their job?
And I thought that guava was a posh word for bird poo.
You learn something new every day.
I'm often accused of talking sh*t, but in this case the word you were thinking of is guano
No need to ban cyclists, all they need to do is go through the ballot for next year. No chance of ever getting a ride!
OK hands up who took on protein before Sawyers Hill and discarded that empty tin of John West tuna ?
I'm absolutely in agreement that we shouldn't litter, and that RideLondon doesn't need the bad press. I can see how a proportion of that might have escaped as it was being put into a jersey pocket and it just wasn't feasible to stop, turn around and look for it with the vast quantity of riders come at you - or that it was lodged in a pocket and came out unawares.
To have any statistical meaning though that route would have to have been fully cleared of all litter prior to the start of the event and any previous gel wrappers removed.
I took on a gel as I entered the start funnel to fuel my first 30 minutes and then as I entered Richmond tucked into a Lucho Dillito - a block of guava wrapped in a dry banana leaf (which I discarded - it is very much biodegradeable) to power me though Sawyers. I wouldn't have wanted to hit that (relatively small I know) incline an hour into the ride without some extra energy. I'm on the every 30 minutes fuelling regime.
I had a couple more over the rest of the 46 miles (I did the baby route) and whilst I had another caffeine gel in the jersey didn't need it. I'm consciously moving to the Lucho Dillitos - less chemicals, and no foil wrapper to worry about post consumption. Well worth a look.
The Friends of Richmond park do seem to push an anti-cyling agenda.
Their report (in pdf) is here: http://www.frp.org.uk/pdf/news/1397_Press_release_Ride_London_2016_monit...
The photo show 5 gel wrappers and 170ish tear strips which isn't good. There is a second photo whcih shows other litter including a coffee cup, pot noodle, beer can and plastic plant pot. This can'be from the riders and is more likely is litter from previous days that hadn't been picked up before.
I raised on their facebook page how this compared with amount of litter that is left behind by people having picnics on a sunny weekend (the bins overflowing and plenty of litter blowing about until the cleaning on monday morning). That problem is much worse, but doesn't involve cyclists, so the FoRP don't make much of a fuse.
As for dangers to deer in the park, the last figures I could find showed that an average of 18 deer are killed each year. 6 hit by cars, 6 by eating litter, and 6 after dog attacks. The FoRP don't seem that keen on stopping cars using the park as a shortcut (the majority of speeding cars), or restricting dog walkers. But anything to do with cyclists gets lots of attention from them.
Cyclists should not drop litter anywhere on any ride. Period.
But so far as RP is concerned, let's not forget that they often have to cull the deer as they over-populate. Surely that's far more cruel than discarding litter?
Eh? I imagine whatever method they use for culling the deer is more humane than them dying by choking...
The deer are culled yes, but it's a death that is fast, and unexpected (gun from a park car) vs struggling death.
clearly people shouldn't be dropping this stuff, there was a breadcrumb trail of this stuff though the parks and Kingston and I assume elsewhere, for a few days.
The other question is since rideLondon is a busness surely they should be putting some more effort /money into the clean up.
The business aspect is the largest cause. Those that ride and use sports products regularly know to take their garbage home with them. The problem is the massive amount of stuff handed out by the sponsors to people who don't really need it. Most people should be eating "food", and possibly gels after the final hub to get them home. Richmond Park is before quarter distance.
At the risk of starting another debate, no it isn't. Managing deer numbers is important for many reasons. Deer levels in the UK are thought to be at the highest level for 1,000 years. If there are too many deer, disease spreads more easily, they can die of starvation in the winter, they can wander into traffic and cause accidents and they cause massive damage to trees and crops.
A competent shot from a .308 or a .243 is pretty much instant and I'm sure the sale of the venison makes an important contribution to the running of the park.
The culing is quick and humaine. Without it the deer would die of more painful dieseses and starvation (as the park can only support a certain number).
They can't move the deer elsewhere and there are no controceptives approved for deer in the UK. So it's the best way they have at the moment.
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