More than a thousand volunteers took to the parks yesterday to help pick up litter in the name of protecting the environment.

Keep Bermuda Beautiful hosted its annual Great Big Bermuda Clean-Up throughout the week in honour of Earth Day on Monday.

Yesterday morning, volunteers with the International Women’s Club gathered at Astwood Park in Warwick to collect as much waste as they could.

Traci Burgess, the executive director of KBB, said that the volunteers found items such as bedroom furniture and wooden doors.

She added: “We literally just pulled out four interior wooden doors.

“They just dumped them on the trail at Astwood Park. A little further down there was a mattress and a bedroom dresser.”

“Those are examples of illegal dumping.

“People are continuing to dump illegally at all of our parks and all across the island.”

Great Big Clean-Up events took volunteers across the island, including Northlands Primary School, Dockyard and about 60 other locations.

Mr Burgess said that while she was unsure how many people appeared for yesterday’s event, there were “probably over a thousand” attendees.

She admitted it was still early to tell how much trash had been collected — but said that previous years have removed more than one million pounds of waste.

She added that last year’s clean-up removed more than 25,000lb of trash with the help of 1,700 volunteers.

The Great Big Bermuda Clean-Up will end tomorrow morning with more than 300 volunteers cleaning up all of Devonshire, starting and finishing at Friendship Vale Park off Palmetto Road.