Up for grabs

The 'Keep Oban Beautiful' group is getting ready for our first 'Oban Spring Clean' at the weekend. Thanks to our hard-working secretary we have a lot of people signed up and with luck there will be less to do every year.

These state of the art 'litter pliers', as the manufacturers call them, have been bought for us by local charity 'MacQueen Bros. Charitable Trust'. We have twenty - the ones in the Blip will be used to collect rubbish at the Black Lynn, the burn, or stream, that runs through Oban, and the rest will be loaned to people or groups to pick litter in other parts of the town. The appropriately named GRAB Trust (Group for Recycling in Argyll & Bute) will be lending more where required, and also gloves and rubbish sacks. Other groups are clearing litter from the town's beaches. Altogether there will be a lot of folk out doing their bit. I'm sure that there will be a lot of people throwing rubbish down too, but I hope they'll feel ashamed!

So we're hoping for a reasonable couple of days to make a big clean up -  and to emphasize the real purpose of the Spring Clean which is to bring home the message to those who actually throw the rubbish down in the first place that they are in a dirty minority!