Here's an idea

By the time we get to 2008, when Liverpool is European Capital of Culture, we want the city to be wonderfully clean. We decided to have a litter festival to get the community cleaning up.

The Goodbye Litter, or G-Litter, festival lasted a week in March.

We held all sorts of events to get community and arts groups together thinking about litter, including community litter picks in 10 areas. The kids made collages out of recycled paper and rubbish, and there were drama groups in schools.

Overall, 1500 people were involved. We collected 3500 bags of litter and filled 25 skips – the city looked really nice. At the finale, we had a giant vacuum cleaner going up William Brown Street. The vacuum had a fight with the Litter Monster, and won, then a big flower came up in the middle.

The community litter picks were really successful. Since the festival, we've been asked to hold three more and we're going to carry them on because once the community gets together, they start thinking of other things they can do.

For example, Gears Residents Association asked us to hold a "best backyard" competition and we had 23 applicants.

We've also got 40 "Glitter bins" in the two main streets in the city centre, which cost £600 each. One side is royal blue with the Capital of Culture logo, and the tops are silver. To decorate the other three sides, we asked 40 schools in the area to send us A4-sized self portraits, as colourful as possible. We chose the 12 best from each school and superimposed them on a bin. People love them. We did have a lot of vandalism of bins before, and this has reduced it.