COUNCIL bosses have thanked residents in Selby for helping reduce street litter by 41 per cent.

The authority launched its Don’t be a Waster campaign in January, as a year-long push to raise awareness of environmental issues and encourage community pride.

Each month will see a different issue tackled, and in January residents were encouraged to pick up one piece of litter in their area, with charities being given money linked to the amount of rubbish collected from litter bins in the town centre under the Bin It For Good project - also involving Keep Britain Tidy and the Wrigley Company.

The scheme has already proved successful. 40kg of rubbish was dropped in Gowthorpe between December 12 and 18, but the figure between January 9 and 15 was 16.4kg less - a reduction of 41 per cent.

Councillor Richard Musgrave said: "These figures are fantastic. It’s been great to see that the people of Selby are backing the Bin it for Good scheme.

"We’ve seen a fantastic district-wide response which shows just how much support there is for this, and the social media campaign for #1PieceofRubbish is growing every day, with images from our residents retweeted both nationally and even internationally.

"We’ve genuinely been blown away by the support and want to say thank you to everyone who has got involved. If you haven’t already joined in, you still can."

The council has also run the #1PieceOfRubbish campaign on social media, encouraging residents to post pictures of themselves using bins, with 3,475 Instagram pictures, 12,031 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram fans and 32,483 kg of rubbish logged so far, with vouchers for Summit Indoor Adventure up for grabs.

Primary school pupils from Riccall Primary School have also joined the campaign, and designed posters to highlight the aims of the campaign – respecting your community and reducing waste.

Head teacher Nick Styles said: "The campaign is all about the values we at Riccall School support. The posters the children have produced show that they care about these issues very much."

To find out more about entering the campaign, go to selby.gov.uk