This was part of the city's river festival and over 20 bags of rubbish were found.
Kristin Hawthorne reports.
Kristin Hawthorne reports.
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00:00Traffic cones, wine bottles, trolleys and even a World War 2 helmet.
00:05Just a few of the items found in Kent's longest river.
00:08Volunteers have been wading through the Great Star as part of Canterbury's River Fest.
00:13Over 20 bags of rubbish were collected but locals say litter all over the city is a common problem.
00:21Well you've got so much rubbish in this river here.
00:24Bikes, shopping trolleys, so much rubbish dumped in grass, foliage.
00:31Yeah, I think it could be looked after a lot better from probably the council as well.
00:35I don't think they spend an awful lot of time on the outskirts of Canterbury.
00:38It's all spent on the inside.
00:40Yeah, so especially around the river I do see quite a lot of rubbish.
00:43But there's lots of bins but I don't think they get emptied very often because they always go overflowing.
00:48We could perhaps help ourselves a little better.
00:50I mean just behind you now madam there's a bag just laying there.
00:53There's bags there everywhere and it's like this is a very important part of Canterbury.
00:58The River Stour is so important to us.
01:01These volunteers say the clean is important because of the wildlife that lives there.
01:05Earlier this year a wild beaver was even spotted swimming in the river.
01:08We have beavers as you probably well know just living a bit further, well both downstream from here and upstream from here.
01:16Very close.
01:18We want to make sure that it's the only city in the country where you can see beavers so easily.
01:24We want those beavers to survive and thrive here on the River Stour.
01:30We're very proud of our River Stour.
01:32We're very proud of living in a place, as I say, with the Chalk Stream River.
01:37And we want it to be here and be better for generations to come.
01:43I've been in the river for just five minutes and I've already found this traffic cone which has clearly been here for a while.
01:49As well as this wine bottle which apparently lots of animals can get trapped in.
01:53Obviously we all like to recycle and eat, you know, cleanly as much as we can.
01:57But we can actually get out and do some cleaning up.
01:59I think that's really, really beneficial for the community.
02:02And I think we don't even, we don't really notice it unless it's either really bad or it's really clean.
02:07And I wish we could just not notice it at all.
02:10After two hours, volunteers were only able to complete half of the stretch they'd planned as part of this year's river festival.
02:17This is because of the sheer amount of litter that was found.
02:20They say that although the city is good at bringing tourists in, the message to take home is to put rubbish in the bin.
02:27Kristen Hawthorne for KMTV in Canterbury.