James Elliott - Grimsby's The Canoe River Cleaner is on a mission - podcast episode

October 17, 2022

James Elliott AKA "The Canoe River Cleaner" is a local hero fighting for the natural world - his battleground is the River Freshney, and the enemy is litter. "It's all about the flow," says James.

He recently joined us for a podcast, you can listen to the full podcast here https://anchor.fm/haiths or click on the play button below.

Canoe River Cleaner

James took a walk along the local river during lockdown... he spotted discarded rubbish floating in the river... and he bought a canoe to clean other peoples' mess up! Why? So that he can make a difference.

River Cleaner

There's no finger-pointing, no appointing blame - just action from James and he's on a single-minded mission to remove litter.

Today, James is known as the Canoe River Cleaner.

River Cleaner

He turned misfortune into an opportunity. He’s changing the health of our local urban river by removing one shopping trolley at a time. He’s thinking a little bit more about the river and biodiversity than the average person and he's using that momentum to get the community involved. He's educating schoolchildren on the merits of making space for nature in an urban setting. But he's not an angry litter picker-upper! He's using his passion for nature to clean up others' rubbish.

Trolleys

River Cleaner

James’s main objective is to shine a light on the importance of a river running clean: in James’s case, it’s the River Freshney, Grimsby, N E Lincolnshire. That’s where you’ll find him doing his work from his Canadian Canoe. If you see him. say hello! Or, better still, look him up online and support his efforts because the world needs more natural history heroes.

Haith’s bird food will be supporting The Canoe River Cleaner with his education programme and making fresh bird food available to encourage people to leave the bread in the bread bin (where it belongs!).

River cleaning