A team of litter pickers have made a Sheffield neighbourhood “a nice place to live”, amid national rises in fly-tipping.

Fly-tipping incidents dealt with by local authorities in England have increased by 9% from 2024 to 2025, according to national statistics from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, published last week.

There were 1.26 million incidents in England from April 2024 to March 2025, 62% of these involved household waste.

Yet Blackstock Open Space, an ancient woodland in Gleadless Valley, has improved dramatically thanks to the work of Iren Wadsworth, 57, and others clearing litter from the area.

After seeing waste strewn in the woods while volunteering with Gleadless Valley Wildlife Trust in 2017, Iren started a litter picking group, just six months after moving to the area.

In the first few years she put a lot of time into advertising and getting corporate parties involved, and these groups would be able to remove four or five tonnes of waste at a time.

She said: “It was a lot of work, but I needed to do that to achieve what I wanted to achieve.”

At the beginning of 2024, Iren had gone over all the woods and brooks in the local area.

Rob Last, 64, lives locally and joined the local litter picking groups in lockdown. He said: “This whole place used to be covered in litter when we first started. We used to get round about 5000 bags of litter, it’s now down to about 2000 a year. 

“It’s got a lot better and people are dropping a lot less stuff now.”

Iren said: “The woods were so depressingly bad that people said they didn’t want to go there, it’s not a pleasant experience. When we’ve cleared the sections round their houses they say thank you so much, now I feel comfortable and like it’s a nice place to live. So that’s what we’ve achieved.”

“We’ve done the major work now. There’s nowhere we’ve completely done because you don’t know what’s still underneath, but it’s a lot better.”

In years of cleaning up other people’s litter, Iren still doesn’t understand why people fly-tip.

She said: “Criminal youth gangs will steal cars and joyride them and set them alight in the woods and that’s their thrill.

“If people want to get rid of stuff, the woods are right by the houses, so they chuck it in the woods. Humans are lazy, they’ll just do the quickest easiest thing. That’s our nature.”

She told Sheffield Wire that littering isn’t always intentional, as sometimes bins fall over, or maintenance teams don’t have the staff to clear heavily littered grassy spaces before mowing.

Rob also litter picks twice a week with Iren and Kev Walters, 54.

Rob said: “I haven’t the foggiest idea why they do it. There’s lots of mysteries. On the way here, I found a set of kitchenware, two boxing gloves, a shower curtain, it’s all just totally random. What they’re doing there or how they came to be there, we have no idea what goes on at night in this valley. 

“We don’t hate these people, they have difficult lives. We work with the people here because we live here and we’re here all the time.

“Loads of people think you can come in and engage with the community but you can’t. You just have to be here all the time because people won’t trust you otherwise.”

Thanks to Iren, litter pickers, bags and gloves are now available in Sheffield libraries for free.