Litter cleaner Chris van den Diepstraten from Made is completely done with it. When he walks through his village, he often comes across plastic bags containing dog poop. To ensure that people care less about litter, he started a campaign this week to make his fellow villagers more aware.
Chris is a ZAPper, which stands for ZwerfAfvalPakker. Armed with a pick and garbage bag, he walks through the streets of his village. “We come across quite a lot of dog poop in plastic bags. In the bushes, public gardens and sometimes on the footpaths. That is of course very bad for the environment.”
“I was done with it!”
And Chris was so tired of the poop bags floating around that he printed cards with the text: ‘Is this normal? Your dog, your shit. Just clean it up.’ “We try to protect nature from litter, especially plastic. And those bags are made of plastic. I was completely done with it!”
Although there are trash cans everywhere, Chris finds his first poop bag with contents after just a few minutes. “The owners do pick up the poop from the ground and put it in a bag, but they then throw it in the bushes a few meters away. I don’t think they want to carry it around and put it in a waste bin or throw it in their own rubbish bin at home,” says Chris frustrated.
He takes every bag of poop out of the bushes and doesn’t leave a note on it. Then he places it on the sidewalk. “Hopefully the dog’s owner will walk past it again and become aware of how bad this is. They often do the same round.”
“All litter pickers participate in it.”
Chris’s idea was enthusiastically taken up by the other litter cleaners from the municipality of Drimmelen. “My coordinator agreed. All other litter pickers participate.”
Quite a few responses have already been received on the joint Facebook page and in the app group ‘WhatZapDrimmelen’. “They even come from outside Brabant. People also see the problem recurring in their own neighborhood.”
On Wednesday, Boy Scholtze, mayor of the municipality of Drimmelen, went out with the rappers. “Then they came across eight bags in one place,” says Chris. “I hope the dog owners will just clean it up and that this will soon no longer be necessary.”
