Rubbish from woodland next to Northampton M1 service station fills up more than 100 bin bags

More than 100 sacks of rubbish has been cleared from a patch of woodland next to an M1 service station near Northampton.

Staff from Roadchef's southbound services at junction 15A cleaned up the area on Saturday (March 20) after being alerted by the Chronicle & Echo and a litter campaigner.

As well as the bin bags, the workers collected tyres, random pieces of metal, pizza boxes and an orange traffic cone.

A Roadchef spokesperson said: "“On March 20, a number of team members from our Northampton site took part in a clean-up activity to remove historic litter from the area.

"As an organisation, we are passionate about reducing our impact on the environment – in fact we are the first motorway service area provider to receive the Hero to Zero Award for reducing the amount of waste we send to landfill, with just 33 per cent going to landfill last year.

"We also received a nomination in the National Recycling Awards for the significant amount of waste (86 per cent) company-wide that is reused or recycled.

“At a local level in Northampton, in pre-pandemic times we would spend approximately 100 hours a week litter picking around the site, and we very much look forward to re-starting these regular clean-ups in due course.

"We would like to thank those who flagged this issue to us – we share your frustrations and hope this will not happen again.”

Kevin Doherty, who styles himself as Banana Man Litter Warrior on Twitter, posted photos of the mess on the UK Litterpicking Groups Facebook group last week.