Mother of All Clean Ups - Post Event Stats!
After COVID-19 forced the event online in 2020, Mother of All Clean Ups returned to Ōtautahi this week, bigger and better than ever. The city-wide event is held annually on Mother’s Day weekend and attracts hundreds of volunteers from dozens of local organisations who come together to remove tonnes of rubbish from Christchurch’s urban waterways.
51 groups participated in this year’s clean up on Saturday the 8th of May with an estimated 1200 volunteers, 700 bags of rubbish collected and approximately 100 additional over-sized items. They were joined by a brand new Mother of All Clean Ups schools event, Operation Riverquest, which took place earlier in the week. Operation Riverquest saw 10.5km of coastline cleaned by 20 schools with approximately 1300 students participating.
While both events are still having the data tallied on exactly what rubbish was collected and how much, Mother of All Clean Ups lead organiser and Estuary Trust Manager, Tanya Jenkins, predicts that it will amount to several tonnes of rubbish again this year. As ever, the usual culprits of food waste and plastic packaging were joined by some more unusual items such as a collection of number plates and plastic bags filled with keys, 8 shopping trolleys and a section of camera film from 1996.
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Tanya says. “The message we want to get out there is that you don’t have to wait until Mothers’ Day to do something for our waterways.”
The good work will continue through another new Mother of All Clean Ups initiative, HIGH FIVE, Tanya says, in which citizens are encouraged to collect 5 pieces of rubbish from their daily travels and upload photos of their findings with the hashtag #highfivenz.
Saturday’s volunteer event concluded, as it does each year, with a celebration courtesy of organiser and sponsor Cassels Brewery. There, volunteers were joined by key personnel from local and national government including Christchurch City Councillor Sara Templeton and Green MP Eugenie Sage.
“The organising team was really aspirational this year,” says organiser Bex De Prospo of Authentic Storytelling and Drinkable Rivers. “After the pandemic put a hold on activities in 2020, it was especially important to us to be as inclusive as possible and offer a range of different ways for everyone to participate.”
This year’s catalogue of events, themed Cleaner Waterways, Your Way, also included a reprise of last year’s virtual event. Mother of All Clean Ups: Home Edition, which launched in lockdown last year, is still available for participation until Wednesday the 12th and offers the opportunity to engage with Mother of All Clean Ups from the comfort of home, with the added incentive of some great prizes up for grabs.