Who we are
George Monck (Chief Executive) is passionate about obliterating litter. George thinks that it was being involved in clearing up litter from an early age that gave him such a determination to solve the litter problem. As well as devoting a lot of his time to keeping his local environment on the Severn Estuary clean, George has picked up litter in many places around the UK, travelling as far horizontally as the Shetland Isles and as far vertically as the top of Ben Nevis to do so. Before starting CleanupUK, George was a management consultant and manager. The most unusual pieces of litter George has found are the combination of the front end of a canoe and a deep freeze, within yards of each other on the banks of the Severn. He still wonders if they were in some way connected…
Alastair Singleton (Chairman of the Trustees) has worked as a diplomat and in executive search. He is a founding director of Hanover Fox International and is an experienced charity trustee, both locally and, for seven years, with the international development charity VSO. He has recently completed an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice at the University of Bath. Alastair has a deep-seated love of nature and natural beauty which, in his view, litter destroys. He regularly joins litter-picking activity in the Bath/Bristol area and, if he could wave a magic wand, he would make central Bath after a Saturday night spotlessly clean. He feels that marketing activity by leaving leaflets on parked cars should be treated as littering and prosecuted accordingly. The weirdest thing Alastair has ever found on a litter-pick was the barrels sawn off a shotgun (which, in case you ask, he handed in to the police !).
Kami Lamakan (Trustee) joined the creative services industry following university, specialising in videos in the pop and advertising sectors. He bought out a corporate video business in 2002 and subsequently transformed it into a specialist employee engagement business. Kami is now Managing Director of The Loop Communication Agency, based in Bristol. Kami’s earliest memory of litter was the discarded pistachio shells that carpeted the floors of cinemas and parks in Iran. He’d spend hours re-arranging them into the shapes of dragons. Since then he’s developed a less playful attitude to litter. He is regularly horrified by what his two young children are endeavouring to pick up from the streets around his home.
Maria Pemberton (Trustee) is currently Director of Operations at The Directory of Social Change. Most of her working life has been spent with charities, large and small, and in many different capacities including fundraising, project management, business development and training. She also a Trustee of Childhope UK and regularly works voluntarily for The Teddington Society, a local group started by residents to protect the character of the town.
In recent years, she has found herself picking up litter in the street, especially when the refuse collectors have just been! Highly organised recycling, where every bit of rubbish has to go in a special container, seems to create more litter than before! What really makes her mad is half eaten food containers just tossed on pavements late at night coupled with the lack of rubbish bins in obvious places. The strangest piece of litter she has found was a credit card from an American Bank in one of her flowerbeds in the back garden – how it got there remains a mystery!
Ivor Llewelyn (Trustee) worked in the civil service for thirty years before taking early retirement. He currently works part-time for the Atlantic Salmon Trust, a charity dedicated to conserving wild salmon, and for the Environment Agency as chairman of a regional advisory committee.
His interest in the problem of litter was kick-started by being asked, in his last post in Defra, to develop the measures that were included in the Clean Neighbourhoods Act 2005; the job also involved responsibility for policy on litter and the quality of the local environment. As a result he learnt at first hand of the difficulties local councils face in dealing with litter and of the imaginative ways that the best of them – but not, sadly, the majority – respond.
His experience convinced him that litter will disappear only when people stop dropping it. Government, both national and local, has a role to play, as do educational campaigns, but litter picking and local clean-up campaigns remain one of the best ways of making people aware of the scale of the problem and of convincing them to do something about it.
Kate Davies (Trustee) currently leads English Heritage’s national volunteering programme where she is dedicated to organising, supporting and championing the work of volunteers in the heritage sector. Professionally Kate’s aim is to protect and promote the historic environment by helping people to enjoy, understand, value and care for it.
Her interest in litter started whilst growing up in Wales where at primary school it was considered a privilege to be selected to pick litter around the school grounds during break time. As a child no older than ten she remembers it was second nature to everyone to be proactive litter pickers – it was fun ! Now Kate wants to encourage everyone to educate the young and involve them in keeping the community clean.
Patricia Kavanagh-Brown (Trustee) runs a chartered accountancy practice which helps companies to stay in control and achieve their future goals. She is passionate about the arts.
Patricia believes in the enormous potential within each human being which, with education, aspiration and vision, could be harnessed for so much common good. Instead of using these gifts, mankind so often perpetrates a lot of harm. Our countryside is astoundingly beautiful and our urban areas are expensively designed and maintained, so why do they end up looking like the inside of a dustbin? Patricia wants to help this to change. The most ghastly litter she has encountered was a tube train which looked like the aftermath of an alcoholic orgy: two abandoned vodka bottles swilling alcohol over food cartons, beer cans and their contents. Once a week, she picks up the contents of one neighbour’s dustbins that end up strewn over the road and front gardens. She wonders if a packaging tax, which is ring-fenced and applied solely to keep the country litter- and chewing-gum free, would help.