The charity making life better by water
Making life better by water
Help make a difference to your local canal by picking up litter. Add your litter pick to the map below to see the difference you’re making alongside other people also taking action.
Find the canal or river where you litter picked. Pinch to zoom on your phone. Zoom in and out using the + and – buttons on your mouse or trackpad on desktop or laptop.
You can also use the ‘use current location’ button in the search bar or using the target icon.
On mobile: once you’ve located your pin position, tap the map to place your pin. On desktop: tap your location on the map, which places your pin.
After, click 'OK' in the top right-hand side of the blue bar.
Don’t worry about getting the spot exactly right – close enough is fine. If you've covered a longer stretch, you can add another pin roughly ever 500 metres to show the area of litter you’ve picked.
Scroll down to the quick drop-down questions below the map to a little more context to your litter pick. We don't ask for any personally identifiable information, just some details about your efforts.
Hit 'submit' and you’re done! Your litter pick will be added to our growing picture of litter picking across the waterways.
Refresh the page to see your pin on the map alongside everyone else’s, or if you've completed more than one pick, you can add another.
Before you head out on the towpath, read our tips on how to safely do your own litter pick
Every year, hundreds of thousands of rubbish and plastic waste items end up in canals and on towpaths, damaging habitats, harming wildlife and spoiling places we rely on for wellbeing.
We need your support in helping make our canals litter-free places to be. Join the 2.6 million1 people already taking to the towpath and collecting the rubbish they find.
By adding your litter pick to our interactive map, you will be helping us build a clearer picture of the action being taken, and help support our plans to protect canals for everyone to enjoy.
When we act together, small actions can make a big difference.
Litter can harm native wildlife by damaging habitats, infiltrating food sources, or by causing serious injury. It can also affect where plants and foliage are able to grow.
For people, it can impact health and wellbeing – whether that’s through making an area a spoiled place to visit, or through impacting recreational activities such as fishing, boating and paddling.
If the litter isn't collected, there's also a high chance it can drift out to sea and cause problems globally. The Marine Conservation Society estimates that 80% of litter in the seas and oceans comes from land-based sources.
As a charity, it costs us an estimated £4 million a year to manage fly-tipped waste and rubbish.
Around 39 million items of litter end up on the towpaths and in the waters of our canals and rivers each year, with plastic making up the biggest share of what we find.
Cigarette butts, dog waste, fly-tipping and alcohol-related rubbish are just some of the other items that regularly contribute to the problem.
Litter reaches our waterways in different ways. It can be blown onto towpaths or washed into the water from nearby areas, and even discarded by people that use them directly.
Our staff and volunteers are already working hard to tackle litter, but as a charity caring for 2,000 miles of canals and rivers, it's a big challenge.
We're removing rubbish through regular clean-ups and volunteer picks, and we're also testing new approaches including litter boats, WasteSharks, bubble barriers and various targeted projects.
Plus, there's a huge amount of community action. An estimated 2.6 million people are reporting to have litter picked on one of our waterways in a 12 month period.
Adding your litter pick to the map helps us build a more thorough picture of where people are taking action, where litter is building up and where more effort may be needed.
The more we know, the better we can understand the scale of the problem. This will then allow us to effectively target our resources and build support for longer-term action to reduce litter and protect our much-loved canals and rivers.
Not able to get out on a litter pick? There are plenty of other ways you can support our work and help protect the canals and rivers you love.
Your regular support can make a vital difference to tackling litter, helping us to protect canals and wildlife
Keep up to date with everything happening along our canals and how your support is fuelling our work
This has been made possible thanks to players of the Postcode Lottery.
An estimated 2.6 million people are reporting to have litter picked on one of our waterways in a 12 month period. ↩
Sign up to our newsletter and discover how we protect canals and help nature thrive
