Yr Wyddfa: Thousands of pieces of rubbish left on Wales' biggest mountain

  • Video credit: British Mountaineering Council

Thousands of pieces of rubbish have been collected by campaigners in just six hours on Wales' biggest mountain.

More than 2,700 pieces of litter were removed from Yr Wyddfa including 800 drinks containers.

The area had never previously been litter-picked, so it's thought some of the rubbish could be 100 years old.

The clean-up was carried out by volunteers from the British Mountaineering Council (BMC), with support from Trash Free Trails.

Expert climbers scaled the Trinity Wall gullies, a popular climbing face on the mountain, to clear litter while volunteers also cleared the Miner's Path.

Single-use products accounted for 63% (1,737) of the items retrieved. Of these, the 809 drinks containers recovered were more common (29.3%) than the 794 snack items found (28.7%).

The BMC believes stopping the use of plastic drinks bottles is one of the “simplest” ways of cleaning up the mountain.Environmental campaigners Trash Free Trails said the presence of so many drinks containers reinforces the need for Deposit Return Scheme (DRS).

These schemes are commonplace in European countries – where they operate by requiring a deposit on plastic bottles and aluminium cans that can be reclaimed either in stores or via “reverse vending machines”.

Expert climbers scaled the Trinity Wall gullies to clear litter while volunteers also cleared the Miner's Path. Credit: British Mountaineering Council

The UK Government had planned to have a DRS in place by 2025 but this has now been delayed until October 2027 to give the industries involved more time to prepare.

The charity Keep Britain Tidy estimates the delay will mean 25 billion more bottles and cans being littered.

Westminster also wants to drop glass from the scheme as its inclusion would be “problematic” for the drinks industry. Wales is the only Home Nation still opposing this proposal.

After the clean-up, Tom Carrick, BMC access and conservation officer for Wales, said: "The Yr Wyddfa Big Clean Up was the first time we have accessed the Clogwyn Y Garnedd gullies, one of the rarest Alpine habitats in the British Isles.

"One of the starkest issues was the volume of single-use plastic bottles; this appears to be one of the simplest items to rid from the mountain.

"A Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) in Wales and England, would encourage a much greater care and thought over what pollution was taken onto the mountain."

Alec Young of Eryri National Park said: "Microplastics have been found in every soil sample monitored on the most popular paths up Yr Wyddfa.

"We see DRS playing a pivotal role in reducing litter on the mountain, and preventing harmful fragmented plastics from entering, and ruining, this fragile environment'".

Dom Ferris, Trash Free Trails’ CEO, said: "Our research has shown that a fifth of interactions an animal has with an item of single-use pollution will end in death, and our volunteers are increasingly finding examples of this occurring when an animal gets trapped inside a bottle or can.

"We know from European case studies that a DRS can eradicate a whole category of litter from our trails overnight; why are we allowing beloved hiking spots such as Snowdon to be the alternative to a reverse vending machine?"

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