As a CMCA member, no matter where you are in Australia you owe it to the environement to keep the country in a pristine condition. This is not that hard to do. Simply think before you empty grey water tanks. Sadly not all towns have dump points. It is a bad move generally to simply empty your tanks into a gutter for instance as in many instances these lead straight to rivers and grease and detergentgents are the enemies of most rivers.

A better solution is to find an area of remote grass well away from water courses and empty there. Similarly washing clothes directly in a river is a giant no no. Wash well away from the water and empty the bucket away from the stream.

Vic from the CMCA Roadrunners Chapter is a passionate CMCA member and always cleans up all areas in which he overnights. The picture above was taken after the CMCA Rally at Quercus Park - a lovely spot at St Helens and right on the water. Vic managed to collect to garbage bags of rubbish. As there was no bin this had to be taken back to town. Now some of the stuff you pick up can have lots of bugs and creepy crawlies - the last thing you want to let loose in your motorhome. What we do is collect in plastic bags and then spray a few seconds of insecticide into the bag and quickly seal. You can then safely carry the bag inside youir motorhome on the step etc. until you find a bin.

Vic used the wonderful tools above. You get these tongs from those cheap outlets like Chickenfeed and Crazy Clarks etc. These start at just $2.00 each and it eliminates all bending and is extremley hygenic and you can't get accidentally bitten by anything, If you can't find one of these all you need to do is place your hand inside another plastic bag if you don't have any plastic gloves. You can get a lot of satisfaction from leaving an area cleaner than when you arrived. We get a real buzz when locals tell us what a wonderful bunch of people CMCA members are because they clean up an area.

Chrissy Eustace