Primary school pupils in Livingston have drawn up a dog-poo map to identify the worst areas around their school in their work to help clean up the community.
Now their map has been reproduced by Ladywell Regeneration group and will form the basis of a new poster campaign in the area, encouraging dog owners to clean up after their pets.
A litter clean-up took place earlier this year and that’s when the P6 class at Harrysmuir Primary decided to start mapping the area for dog fouling. They quickly identified the worst areas around the school.
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The mapping survey targeted 11 streets and paths around the school and found the worst affected areas were Ryebank, Harrysmuir Path and Loan Path.
Elaine Carder, Principal Teacher at Harrysmuir pointed out that the school regularly uses outdoors as an extra classroom for a variety of lessons.
She told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “I have been working with two groups of P6 children on the John Muir Award. As part of the work we did towards the award we carried out litter picks. Whilst doing this we noticed a lot of dog dirt so decided to do a survey of the dog dirt we found. Each group went out and surveyed areas around our school and local area.
“We plotted the findings on a map produced by the Ladywell Regeneration Group. This map showed the location of the bins in the area. By using the same map we could work out whether the dog dirt may have been left because there were no bins nearby or whether it was because dog owners were just not picking it up.
“You can see from our map that there were two areas that a lot of dog dirt was found. One area to the West was at the far end of the Harrysmuir Path and the other area, to the East, was along the Loan path and surrounding area. We know that there is no bin at the far end of the Harrysmuir Path area so this will need to be looked at, however the other area does have bins.”
The class work has already received widespread publicity and support on social media through groups such as West Lothian Litter Pickers. Now the pupils plan to work with the Ladywell Regeneration Group and Cleaner Communities team on the council to see if signage and pavement stencilling can be put in the key hot spot areas.
“Once that is in place we will carry out another survey to see if it has made any difference,” said Mrs Carder
She added: “We are also planning to do a community litter pick over the weekend of 10 and 11 September to encourage local people to get involved. More information will be shared nearer the time.”
