This was a really eventful Sunday Pick Me Up so I gotta fill you in! On Sunday June 12, we headed back to our favourite garbage spot, the infamous Ikeda Koen and collected 78kg of trash! 
This time we were helped by a new street cleanup group, アイ・アース who picked up a huge amount of garbage, even though their team was much smaller! Way to go guys! Thank you Momo and the rest of the アイ・アース gang for helping to keep Nagoya clean! 
Summer is in full swing, so we thought we’d give you a refresher of one of our classic Eco-Habits, PET bottles!
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First, some good news:
Japan is one of the best in the world for recycling PET. In 2021, 89% of PET bottles were recycled! We also made bottles thinner, which saves resources.
That’s all great! But – that doesn’t mean we should continue using them.
22.7 billion PET bottles are used just in Japan every year. That’s 180 per person every year! 89% are recycled, but that means that 11% didn’t. That’s more than 2 billion bottles that end up somewhere – on the streets, in the forests, and in the oceans.
Outside of Japan, 481 BILLION plastic bottles are used a year. That’s a million each minute 
Only 9% are recycled (!!) and this rate is going DOWN. 91% don’t get recycled, where they take 451 years to biodegrade. Plastic bottles are the third most-cleaned up item in beach cleanups, meaning a lot they’re finding their way into the ocean, which endangers marine life 
What do we do?
It’s a super simple solution that just requires a new habit – BYOB.
Bring your own bottle!
Choose metal or glass over plastic! If everyone at this pick me up started using their own bottle, we could save thousands of bottles every year 
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This month was the last event for one of our most important co-organisers 
Kaja has been an invaluable asset to Sunday Pick Me Up and to Small World. She has helped craft an identity and personality for this event, and showed everyone just how fun it can be to look after the city. You will be missed, and we wish you the best in Osaka. We love you!
We’ll be back on July 10 for the next Sunday Pick Me Up! I’ll be in the UK for all of July, but the rest of the team should be able to hold it together without me Have a great time!
– Matthew, Kaja, Shehran, Jennifer, Rio, Shu & Masa
