THIS week, as part of The Westmorland Gazette's Blitz Lakeland Litter campaign, we caught up with some of the workers on the front line of the area's battle with rubbish, reports Ruth Lythe.

South Lakeland District Council workers Malcolm Townley and Paul Fairclough make up the two-man team charged with cleaning up Kendal town centre and the network of roads between Kendal and Sedbergh, Milnthorpe and Arnside.

The pair start their day at 6.30am, when they set to work on Kendal town centre with their street cleaning machine.

Then, armed with litter pickers, bin bags and fluorescent jackets, they take their grapple with the grime out into the countryside, where they clear rubbish from the verges of Lakeland roads.

At least one of them hits the streets of South Lakeland every day of the year in all kinds of weather.

And on Wednesday (February 7), Mr Townley and Mr Fairclough were joined by The Westmorland Gazette as they cleaned up the roadside verges along the A65.

The state of South Lakeland's main roads have been frequently highlighted by readers, who have written into The Westmorland Gazette, as part of the paper's Blitz Lakeland's Litter Campaign, which aims to identify the area's worst grotspots.

Since the campaign was launched three weeks ago, the number of people contacting SLDC about litter problem areas has increased dramatically.

And although the same stretch of road between Oxenholme and Stainton was cleaned just over a week before, already the rubbish had returned.

Sweet and crisp wrappers, a couple of glass vodka bottles and tin cans, carelessly flung out of car windows, were scattered over several miles of road.

Mr Fairclough, 41, believes that South Lakeland's litter problem is getting worse.

Although both enjoy their jobs, the street cleaners sometimes feel the public does not always notice their hard work. On some occasions the pair have even had rubbish thrown at them by passing motorists.

During the course of the morning, the pair collect rubbish from two stretches of the A65.

In the past, unusual finds have included a blow-up doll found in a street, which Mr Fairclough believes was left over from a stag party.

Today, the rubbish left on the verges is not so interesting and mainly consists of drink bottles and sweet wrappers, as well as some of the wreckage left over from a car crash.

Ten bags of litter later, the pair load up their litter pickers and move on to their next job of the day.

But before their SLDC truck disappeared into the sunset on its way to another Lake District grotspot, Mr Fairclough urged people to think carefully about what they did with their rubbish.

"If we had a message to anyone, it would be to ask them to think before they drop their litter," he said.

"We can only react to the stuff that people call in about. It is people's responsibility to make sure they put it in the bin."