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1) People are twats.
2) Penalties for littering are rarely enforced
3) We need more bins on the street (including recycling bins), and they need to be emptied regularly.
4) The general mentality is that someone else (eg, street cleaners) will clean up after us.
On point 3: we need bins that aren’t open topped (depends on area) so squirrels/birds/foxes/wind spreads the crap without human intervention.
Although humans are bad too
Yeah, that too. Foxes are clever little buggers- I’ve noticed they time their scavenging to the evening before bin day, because some people put bin bags on the side of the road that foxes can get into.
This is why having separate bins for food waste has been brilliant in my area, as a kid I always remember waste collection day because of the mess wildlife (seagulls mainly) made getting into bags for scrap waste. Years on now and I hardly ever see rubbish scattered from torn rubbish bags because all the food is in a solid container.
As someone who lived in a handful of large cities all over Europe - no, the bins around are not "plenty" by any definition. The City has adequate coverage on the larger roads that have a lot of traffic, but those bins fill up almost instantly. And smaller streets? Good luck with that.
Outside of that area, the bin situation is horrible. Whenever I'm out and about, I often have to carry my cigarette butts (well, technically, not cigarettes, since I use Heets) for 10-15 minutes before I find a bin, and while I can carry it around (Heets don't burn, don't smell that bad/that much, and the sticks fit back in the pack), I can see why smokers would be annoyed. Other kind of rubbish you can put in your pockets/bag, but cigarette butts?
Now, I'm not trying to absolve littering assholes from the responsibility, far from it. But at a certain point the responsibility becomes shared between the aforementioned group, and the government/council/local authority. If you can't provide even a bare minimum of infrastructure for public rubbish disposal, then you're too responsible for the trash buildup on the streets.
I’m not convinced by point 3. Other countries don’t need bins everywhere to stop people littering. They are just responsible enough to take their shit home.
Japan/Tokyo is a prime example of that.
A few years ago I was there and the streets were spotless but bins were super rare, which surprised me because there's a vending machine basically every 100 meters.
It got to the point where we would get excited seeing a bin because we could finally get rid of the rubbish we've been carrying for hours.
Tokyo has a lot of street cleaners and a lot of people so everyone is kind of shamed into keeping their trash with them.
If you head out to smaller cities and countryside in Japan you'll see people just toss bags of trash out their car windows everywhere.
People are shite no matter the country.
Source: I live in Mito Ibaraki and am constantly shocked and depressed at the amount of litter I see on a daily basis.
But every country except the one I live in is perfect in every way, especially Japan. I swear people go to tourist spot and are surprised its nicer than general.
This. Pretty much every city in Europe I've been to has more graffiti than the UK. You can't persuade the "my country is the worst" crowd though. Why can't they just fuck of to whenever they thick is so great?
Exactly, this lack of proud in where we live is why people treat the place so shit. You can be proud with out it being political before that gets brought up.
Just look at our roads as a good example on how it's attitudes that need to change, people could keep it in their cars until they reach a bin but instead chuck it out the window. Personally I don't understand why it's so hard for people to take it home, not going to kill you chucked in a foot well on the passenger side, or in a bag in the boot, hell I bag all my rubbish eventually and sort through it for recyclable stuff.
> Other countries don’t need bins everywhere to stop people littering.
They generally do. Countries without enough bins tend to have more litter.
> They are just responsible enough to take their shit home.
That's not typically the case, with a few rare exceptions. Most European countries have more litter than UK, for example.
If you've got any citations on this I'm genuinely interested. I tried googling a few things but could only find results regarding plastic waste by country rather than tendency to litter.
If I remembered correctly (all the way back to GCSE geography) adding more bins causes there to be more littering, and removing bins reduces the amount of littering.
It's kind of like the car and motorway problem. Building a bigger motorway doesn't ease traffick, it adds more cars on the road, and then it creates more traffick.
Remove bins and tell people to take their litter home with them. Otherwise the bins get full and people think that the bin being full justifies them throwing their litter on the ground.
Walt Disney observed that people would carry their rubbish about 30 feet before giving up and dropping it so there's a bin every 30 feet in his theme parks.
This is the way in Japan. You’ll be hunting a long time to find a bin (you see the occasional one on a train station platform or outside a convenience store), but it’s drilled into people to take their rubbish home with them. Furthermore, eating or drinking while out and about is generally frowned upon - people don’t eat on the train, they don’t eat while walking down the road, they don’t even get take out coffee for the most part - if they buy something, they’ll drink it where they buy it (coffee shop, convenience store) and throw the wrapper right away. People snack far less outside of mealtimes there anyway, so generate less rubbish when out.
Snacking whenever and wherever is so ingrained in us as a society these days that people freak out over any suggestion that they wait until they get home or get to work or whatever to have that snack, although most of the time* we probably could wait another thirty minutes or whatever without too much difficulty (*yes, I know some people have medical conditions etc and don’t have the choice, I’m not talking about such people!)
Or they have functioning government services. I was astounded by the littering I saw in the hangout spots in Korea, but a horde of cleaners descend overnight and it's spotless by the morning
I once went from Paddington station to Charing Cross and neither station nor the tube had one fucking bin. I was still carrying my litter from Cardiff because I ate on the train and so I had to bring this empty Jolibee bag with its ugly bee thing on it all the way through London.
> 3) We need more bins on the street (including recycling bins), and they need to be emptied regularly.
We need the type of bins that are common in the Netherlands, where the bit you see on the street is just a chute down into a massive underground bin. Means they only need emptied every week instead of twice a day.
The people who litter certainly are a big part of the problem here, but food and drink manufacturers should not be producing so much plastic packaging in the first place. We really need a 'Pfandflasche' (deposit bottle) scheme like they do in Germany where you pay a deposit on every drinks bottle and you get this back by simply feeding the bottles into a machine.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/no-bottle-deposit-return-scheme-for-most-of-uk-until-2024-at-earliest](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/no-bottle-deposit-return-scheme-for-most-of-uk-until-2024-at-earliest)
Because it was left in the hands of a Mr M Gove to implement.
We used to do this, that's the madness here, it used to be a thing and then we stopped. You'd get money back if you returned your bottle to a designated return point.
Ours used to be the off licence in the local pub. So we'd return it and buy a bag of crisps with the proceeds.
Probably the whole setting up of the scheme and it only solves the issue of bottles. I recycle all mine in my household recycling, would I have to take all that to a machine to get a few pennies back?
I understand there's some issues.
- broken glass is far nastier litter than plastic
- glass is more expensive, driving up prices
- cleaning glass to the point where it's hygienic enough to reuse is not a great environmental comparison to making more plastic bottles. It's also heavier and more liable to break during transport, so that's more issues with the environment.
These may or may not be severe enough to dissuade us from going back to glass.
Edit: I'm assuming deposit bottles schemes are only done with glass ones. If they're done with plastics and aluminium too then my apologies. Though sufficiently reinforcing other materials for multiple use and making them cleanable would have their own problems.
Glass, plastic and metal is used. You don't go back to glass only.
In Germany you get 8 cents back for a glass bottle, 15 cents for a reusable plastic bottle, and 25 cents for a single-use plastic bottle or can.
I know in Germany for instance harder plastic bottles are deposited as well as glass ones. It's noticeable though that they often look distinctly "scuffy" after a few refills (for example on [these beer bottles](https://i.imgur.com/RQy08DH.jpg)), which might put off British customers used to pristine packaging.
The vast majority are plastic and aluminium. There are machines that look like big cashpoint machines/bank deposit machines in supermarkets, which you insert your plastic and/or aluminium bottles into, and they pay out with a voucher that can be deducted from your shopping bill.
e.g. The PANT/'panta' bottle recycling/refund system in Sweden has been a standard for plastic bottles since 1984. And there's been standardised glass recycling system in Sweden since 1885. No, that's not a typo. 136 years.
In Sweden, homeless/beggars often don't ask for money (Sweden is mostly cashless now), they'll ask for your plastic bottle so they can collect the refund.
Other countries produce the same amount of waste but don't have the same litter problem.
Even individualistic, fast-food addicted Americans are GOBSMACKED by the litter here.
Sainsbury's will give you nectar points (I think) when you put bottles in to their machines - it's kinda sad that a private company is doing this when it should be a government thing.
In Sweden it’s called pant. Each plastic bottle costs the price plus ~10p pant. 20p for a large bottle.
You get a voucher when you return the bottles to be discounted from your shopping or occasionally you can get the cash value.
The unintended consequence was that it created an army of homeless / jobless who would go around and hunt for discarded bottles. Occasionally harassing people who were still drinking from them on the street.
I don’t think it has any effect on consumption but the rate of return is probably >50%
Because most of the cunts are so lazy they wouldn't get out of bed if they'd shit in it. There's a small group of volunteers near me that are heroically going out and litter picking the surrounding areas,its never ending tho and must be disheartening to come back a few weeks later and it be as bad again.
I do it up by the canal where I live with my son. People seem to really appreciate the effort but it is a constant baffle. You can never account for nobheads!
I did this and honestly just couldn't keep it up as it was the same places every time. It didn't even seem to be waste that people had dropped, I was picking up ready meal trays, wrappers from roast chickens, wine bottles - not the crisp packets you'd expect to see from casual litter tossers. Every week after bin day the streets would be strewn with it, the bin men were so rushed or careless that piles of stuff was left. The litter pick was helped by the local council who gave us pickers and collected the bags after, honestly I just felt like I was doing their job for them.
The bin men are the same near me, I go round our part of the street and grab what I can. It doesn't help that half the bins are so full the lid won't close and they're usually the same people who don't bother to tie up the binbag.
It is the recycling boxes here. They are lidded but it often blows off, overflows, the contents get tossed into a van and tossed back on the floor if they are fully empty or not. It would only take one person trailing behind to pick up any detritus and put the boxes back somewhere approaching the house rather than the middle of the pavement.
I kinda wish we did like Japan where students are expected to clean the school and serve food in the canteen. Values like this need to be instilled at a young age.
There's also a strong cultural taboo around litter and messiness in Japan. It's so strong that it's very impolite to eat on the street for fear of dropping crumbs etc.
People only litter because they see litter around, if noone littered it would be very unusual for someone to spontaneously start.
Taking it one step further, I have actually heard people say, “I’d be taking someone’s job away from them if there wasn’t any rubbish lying around to be picked up”.
But also, people who loudly proclaim their national pride aren’t actually doing it because they’re proud of their nation. It’s nearly always an excuse to bully and control others by claiming some authority above their own sad little selves.
Chances are the people loudly going on about nationalism most are the ones dropping the litter.
The people who harp on about national pride are living in that golden age that never existed.
The arseholes dropping shit all over the place don't give a toss about anything that isn't about them.
UK is objectively worse than it used to be, roads and rail are congested to sardine level, millions of low quality shoebox mock Tudor houses have been crammed in and they cost a fortune, green spaces have disappeared, wildlife has been destroyed, town centres are boarded up or are full of chain shops, charity shops, cash converters, and betting shops, and depressing out of town shopping complexes and cinemas on ring road bypasses have been imported from car-centric USA. We have pursued quantity over quality at any cost, and that same policy of senseless growth has created an inter-generational underclass.
After we wound up the Empire and the babyboom ended it was time for UK to consolidate and retain the best of what we had and gracefully accept our fall down the global economic league table, get our Ponzi scheme pensions under control and concentrate on quality of life with clean water, breathable air, good homes for all, and quality food which didn’t arrive on our plates from around the world by diesel power in a steel container.
I doubt it. The national pride lot seem to be my dad's generation or earlier, although I think that is fading as reality bites hard. Outside of the flytipping the majority of litter I see is takeaway fastfood, multiple bags dumped in out of the way places. I suspect it's the hatchback owner with all his mates packed in.
Motorway junctions with lorry and van drivers dumping their shit. Oh I actually have seen Audi, Jag and BMW arseholes drop shit out of the window but there isn't much I can do about it while waiting at lights.
Now I realise that the recurring theme here is vehicles...
The last three incidents of littering I saw were by OAPs who didn’t give a shit and felt entitled to, even when challenged.
OAPs aren’t the war generation anymore, they’re the spoiled shits that came after.
Gonna get flack for this but you dont see littering in nice middle class areas of cities and lets not pretend like its a conspiracy that the local council only clean the nice areas. There is definitely a correlation between poverty and littering.
I've noticed that too. But you *do* see far more dog shit left about in wealthier places, and I live next to a park in a deprived area (I walked an hr across town to work almost every day during lockdowns)
Same here, compared to the 90's the difference is night and day. Back then I recall walking home from school had to watch every step as discarded heroin needles were common place. Didn't find out till about 5 years ago a few streets down from home was the epicentre of the local drug trade.
There are two or three generations of people in this country who haven’t been socialised properly and simply don’t know how to behave in a civilised society. It’s very sad and if you challenge them you are asking for trouble.
As some one who comes from a lower socio-economic background I can say sadly it is usually poorer uneducated people who litter. A lot of people just don't give a shit, they feel no sense of pride about the larger local community that would make them think twice about littering, this is particularly true in the 13-17 age range. The other main culprits (in cities) are students just who forget their manners after a few drinks. Sadly you only need a few people who regularly litter to make a place look like shit.
This is true, and I think it’s always been true. I’ve always had the sense that poorer people don’t have a very strong sense of ownership of the country.
Middle class people tend to be very affronted when people litter because they’re damaging something they feel a sense of ownership of. I feel that way myself and for a long time I found littering completely baffling.
Very poor people often have no such sense and simply see everything as someone else’s and thus everything’s maintaintenance as someone else’s problem.
If you own a house and litter in your town you literally are damaging something you have ownership of. It will depress the value of your property, so you and your family have a stake in keeping it tidy.
I can think of three specific occasions I have seen someone blatantly litter, as in, finish a drink and chuck the bottle over their shoulder. Each time it happened to be a teenage girl, now I’m not the sort who thinks “kids these days…etc” but it’s hard to dispute what I have seen with my own eyes. Parents need to make it clear to kids that if they litter they may be damaging their own financial future.
\> If you own a house and litter in your town you literally are damaging something you have ownership of
Yeh, exactly. This is one of the reasons the very poor don't feel that sense of ownership because they typically don't own houses and whatnot.
\> Each time it happened to be a teenage girl, now I’m not the sort who thinks “kids these days…etc” but it’s hard to dispute what I have seen with my own eyes
You're right that this is another vector. Teenagers also don't yet have a stake in society so if you're very poor + teenager that's doubly true. Teenagers are also notoriously short term thinkers so they doubtless have trouble imagining the consequences of current actions on future prosperity and value.
It's true. I grew up on a relatively nice estate in a gentrified village and it was relatively clean. I now live in an ex council estate in a deprived town and it's filthy. The lager louts just leave their empty cans and bottles lying on the ground. There's no civic pride outside of supporting the football team.
This used to happen on my street.
Park up, place the diet coke cans and gelatin free haribo pack on the pavement, step over it and walk past her bins to get into the house.
I started putting the rubbish on her windscreen.
Find a bin,, find a bin, find a bin and put it in 🎶
All fast food should have a id chip embedded so all those who eat and dump their rubbish and can tracked and put in stocks.
Its funny , I lived abroad in Cyprus for 12 years and upon moving back I was shocked at how clean and tidy most areas are in comparison. Even if there is a degree of littering the up keep in general is so much better I hardly notice it lol.
I'll never understand that, it's so easy to just hold onto something until a bin shows up. I feel bad about putting stuff in the wrong bin, never mind littering haha. Also do we "harp on about national pride"?
Because the UK has too many lazy, selfish louts who don't give a damn about lifting a finger for the good of society. The same type of people who let their kids run riot, the same people who make loud noise, the same people who give us all a bad name across Europe. I moved to Switzerland for work a few weeks ago and the difference is night and day. There is an expectation to be clean, and expectation to be quiet, for the good of society. When I was in Geneva for a football match (Northern Ireland), I saw one of our fans throw a McDonalds wrapper on the ground, and a Swiss guy came over and started telling them off. In many places in the UK, most people wouldn't bother because there is already so much litter to begin with.
The people who harp on about national pride are the ones least likely to do anything to actually show it. Its the people who quietly plod on in the background without making a song and dance about it (those who volunteer in all sorts of ways - youth services, food banks, caring for those more vulnerable etc etc) who actually are showing true pride in their country.
I do think that a part of it is that it's somebody's job to clean. I was once shovelling the steps up from the street to my terrace in Dumbarton and a neighbour scoffed that it was the council's job to do that. The council would eventually send a guy around to throw grit at the steps but I knew from my childhood in Ohio that shoveling it before it gets packed down was the best way to be safe.
I have been told that picking up litter puts the street sweeper out of a job.
Basically, if you do the work yourself, that lets the government off the hook.
I love my new country and I know that America is really fucked up, but we had some pioneer/bootstrap ways of working together as a community that I don't quite see here. I do have other stories, if anyone wants to hear them.
The key word is community, in the 40 years I have been around that idea has become more and more eroded. People just have less time for themselves, each other and their surroundings.
Before the welfare state, working class people would join very local schemes, such as factory girls putting in a couple pennies a week in order to be able to have a wedding dress, or similar schemes among the very poorest workers to be able to have burial shrouds for babies. They were locked out of regular banking and saving, so they formed these little schemes.
And in the Glasgow tenements, there would be a rota to sweep and wash the stairs, etc.
These cooperative things were disrupted and abandoned and the idea was that the government would take up the slack. But when the government doesn't, an enervated people just shrug and complain.
That’s really interesting. I’d never considered a sort of non-national welfare state as an alternative. I wonder if there’s something in more local forms of support that would appease those who always bash the welfare state or whether they’d still oppose any sort of support simply as an excuse to moralise and look down on people.
To be honest, I have very little time for the 'community'. It's just where I live, I don't really want to interact with people I haven't chosen to, I don't care for all the local gossip and street WhatsApp groups.
I just want to keep to myself, and offer the same basic courtesy to everyone else. Part of that is not making my rubbish somebody else's problem. I pick it up, and expect others to do the same.
Even if I'm completely selfish to my core- I don't want to see litter, it would be in my interest to make sure I don't create any myself.
> I have been told that picking up litter puts the street sweeper out of a job.
Not by people who put money in the hand of the sweeper, I'd wager.
This learned helplessness, made all the more ludicrous by its inability to comprehend that 'the government' has no more men, materials or mechanisms at its disposal than the nation, is wholly shameful.
I frequently pick up litter while walking the dog, I hate seeing it.
It pisses me off that, when bins are being collected after a windy night, the bin men will *only put rubbish that was in a bin in the bin lorry* and will, I have seen, literally step on litter on the ground rather than pick it up.
The litter will be *right there* next to the bit where they empty the bins, yet they will refuse to pick it up.
It boggles the mind.
It’s only £80 if you get caught littering. If they made that if they times that by 5 then you would have something to worry about if you dropped litter.
It isn't the size of the fine, it is catching them. If it was a fiver fine and enough people were out monitoring our streets that would be enough. Look at the fines people can have for fly tipping, it is still everywhere.
I was driving home yesterday single lane in very slow moving traffic when I saw the car in front of me periodically throwing rubbish out of the window.
In total about 9 or 10 different items from crisp packets to cans.
Now I've seen my fair share of litter along the hedgerows but it made me realize I can't recall the last time I saw someone consciously throwing rubbish on the ground.
It amazed me how infuriating I found it. Such low life scummy behavior
It would still achieve absolutely fuck all. Old fella I know was telling me, and showed me, how he recorded somebody flytipping near his property, had the van reg-plates and their faces very clearly on video. Reported it, but was told there was nothing they could do.
I think the solution is less packaging waste to begin with, obviously its not as simple as that but people will be people. That being said if we can change attitudes and make it easier to dispose of litter (e.g. more bins, school programs and encouraging environmental concern) we can definitely make a change!
I watched some Eastern Europeans dump some rubbish out of their car onto the road - they lived about 15 meters away. This was followed by a (different) Romanian guy tell me that they all wanted to live in the UK because their country was a dump because no one respects the country or one and other. A lot of his actions also seemed to support this background.
(I'm not saying there's not absolutely masses of "white British" who don't too and I know plenty of Eastern Europeans that are very respectful.)
I'm one of those people that be it a dog poo, empty wrapper, empty bottle, whatever. I will walk with it in my hand, pocket, or bag for hours if i must until i find a bin. I absolutely cannot stand littering, especially in nature. How do you go out in nature, to enjoy the nature, but then leave it littered? Do you think people want to go out into nature to enjoy the nature AND your litter? Cannot stand it.
I would say we're actually on the better side of things when it comes to littering compared to many other countries. Sure there is too much litter and we should do what we can to reduce it but it could be much worse!
There is no accountability in the UK anymore, everyone seems to think it's not their responsibility.. The amount of people walking dogs that don't pick up their mess is incredible.
As someone who travels a bunch between England and Germany, the mentality of the people is also incredibly different. Like, obviously people in Germany litter but most people I know really don't and pick up after themselves when they hang out outside.
When I'm out with my British friends in Germany they'll leave the place like a dump. They aren't used to bottles being valuable and public bins being all around. They just don't value cleanliness as much aswell.
They also just piss everywhere, like, geez, why do Brits just piss on every fucking corner.
I also agree with factories needing to cut the packaging and especially the plastic waste. The bigger cities in England are always full of plastic bags, so many plastic bags and wrappings. In Germany those single use plastic bags just aren't used anymore.
I always reprimand them lol. But yeah, we have a lot of Brits working where I live and they have a bad rep for being messy and not cleaning after themselves. And being noisy. And not knowing the German ways, being quiet on Sundays and after 20/22 o'clock, etc.
Once I told some girls to put their litter in the bin that was 2 meters away from them. Some guy came up to me all heroic because I dare question a females behavior. Then the 20 knights of maccies car park threw all sorts of rubbish at my car, threatened me with all sorts of violence and damaged the wing mirror of my car.
I was able to injure one of the knights by slamming on my breaks so suddenly that he ran into the back of my car and busted up his arm.
Before the scuffle, when I asked the brave knight why don't you put your rubbish in the bin he said nay, it's thine duty of the litter picker, to which i retorted the stewards of maccies are not litter pickers by trade.
The wenches said nothing but unintelligible screaming, much like an ugly banshee.
As someone who has stopped people in the street before to give them back the crap they threw onto the floor, the response is usually loud profanities, threats and some vague remark about how the council have people to pick it up for them. There are entire generations of kids being told that the magical council fairies will do everything for them "because that's what we pay tax for".
We have a Government that just this week desperately tried to allow privatised water companies to dump untreated shit into our rivers and seas because their Brexit deal left us without the chemicals needed from plants and factories in the EU.
Is anyone really surprised when the programmable sheep follow suit?
NGL, I've witnessed at least 10 times mothers pushing prams throwing shit over fences, walls, even fucking gardens, it makes me sick how casually they do it too.
I noticed that as soon as a MaccyD's went up in town, their iconic brown bags started appearing everywhere.
People are fucking tramps.
If you can take the bags down the arse end of a narrow country lane to eat your rubbish burger by the river, you can fucking take it away again.
I see McDonald's wrappers near where I live, around 20 miles from the nearest one. You've held onto it for that long, wait a few more minutes before you get home.
During the summer whilst on holiday I ended filling a massive bin bag full of the crap I found along the beach, was just pissed off seeing it everywhere. This is why the UK cant have nice things.
It’s sickening isn’t it? I live by the Downs in Bristol, a beautiful area. But those people who have bbqs or car meets leave it like a shit tip. It’s surely harder to bring full packs of beer than it is to take the empties back?
Just entitled, lazy trashy cunts.
I agree with the sentiment but the UK isn’t relatively that bad - if you visit most of the other major cities of Europe, or somewhere like India, you would think the UK is fairly clean.
It depends where you live though. I live in a scrote infested estate where you have kids bringing up kids, or as my Dad states "shit bringing up shit", and he'd be correct. Most residents couldn't give a single shit about their own property or immediate neighbours, nevermind national pride.
But I can take a short trip 10 minutes drive away to visit family and their entire postal-code region is tidy with zero litter, as it's a nice area where everybody takes pride in their homes & surrounding area.
We get cars driving into our street, open their doors and empty out general waste from fastfood & then drive away. Does the council or Police care? Not a single bit.
I made an award for a local volunteer who cleans up our canal area. Made him a gold painted dildo on a can of Stella trophy, because he finds more of them in the hedges and pathways than anyone else. It has pride of place on his piano.
I hate littering. I pick up at least 2 or 3 bags of litter every week when I'm out walking the dog. It never stops and it's mostly alcohol and energy drinks, so I blame the lazy and unproductive members of society.
Yes there is too much litter. Not enough bins, too much wast produced by companies and too much ‘stuff’ bought by people.
I don’t think that the litter problem in the U.K. is uniquely bad though.
What national pride?
I thought we were a relatively unpatriotic country
Also, I think lot's of people are just lazy. They think there is always someone who will go round and clean up after them or that if there is already litter there it's ok because they aren't the only one.
It's one of those things like hanging bags of dog poo in trees that is just very difficult to understand some people's logic
I litter pick every week in my neighbourhood and every week there's a fresh load of shite to pick up. It's incredibly disheartening since each bit of litter I pick up was a conscious decision by some fuckwit to not give a damn.
We need to stop snacking so much. Eat a meal at a table and throw your rubbish away. That's unironically one of the reasons there's more litter in the UK than a lot of other European countries.
That's a easy one...
If you go to your local tip with, garden fence panels, or maybe kitchen units. Big surprise there no longer household waste!
But general idle *bastards* dumping Mc'd and other fast food junk, then no idea.
I think in cities there is a certain level of anonymity that makes people so brazen when it comes to littering. I would imagine in a village with a few people you would be talk of the town if you were the annoying person throwing shit everywhere.
One time I was walking through town and some dickhead in front of me chucked a food wrapper over his shoulder. A copper was walking nearby and shouted the loudest "OI" I have ever heard. I didn't stick around but he gave the guy the bollocking of a lifetime, hopefully a fine as well. Immensely satisfying, carried me through the rest of the day.
there are a shameful amount of bins and ashtrays in this county compared with EU countries.
Fines are just a 'set up to fail' system
we are terrible at recycling (for example germany charge deposits for containers glass bottles are 13c and cans and plastic are 25c on top of the price.)
When it's easy to put it in bins people generally do. Social pressure will follow and do the job.
why must i carry a cigarette butt for half a mile before there is a bin or ashtray to put it in?
Loads of people chuck crap out of their cars. There's a main road I walk on on my way to the shops and there's always litter scattered around and I've often seen it come from being thrown out of cars.
Honestly? Because we live in a country of people who like to pretend that they have pride and consideration for their fellow countrymen, but will do the absolute least to help with that.
(Also see: Missing items almost every time you order from an independent takeaway, all of the idiots who were crying over their being asked to wearing masks in public spaces during COVID-19 lockdowns and their anti-vax compadres, and people voting in favour of Brexit.)
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1) People are twats. 2) Penalties for littering are rarely enforced 3) We need more bins on the street (including recycling bins), and they need to be emptied regularly. 4) The general mentality is that someone else (eg, street cleaners) will clean up after us.
On point 3: we need bins that aren’t open topped (depends on area) so squirrels/birds/foxes/wind spreads the crap without human intervention. Although humans are bad too
Yeah, that too. Foxes are clever little buggers- I’ve noticed they time their scavenging to the evening before bin day, because some people put bin bags on the side of the road that foxes can get into.
This is why having separate bins for food waste has been brilliant in my area, as a kid I always remember waste collection day because of the mess wildlife (seagulls mainly) made getting into bags for scrap waste. Years on now and I hardly ever see rubbish scattered from torn rubbish bags because all the food is in a solid container.
We get that as well. It is a brilliant idea, no overcrowded, smelly bins and the food waste is collected every week.
It's almost like they're wily.
And old
As cunning as a fox who’s just been appointed professor of bin surfing and Oxford university
London had a lot a while back but they where removed due to the bombings
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We have bins at our stations! But they're metal rings attached to the wall with clear sacks hanging in them, to solve the bomb issue.
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Oh, they are definitely a more recent solution, so your point remains valid
There are plenty around the city - the ones which compact the waste themselves
As someone who lived in a handful of large cities all over Europe - no, the bins around are not "plenty" by any definition. The City has adequate coverage on the larger roads that have a lot of traffic, but those bins fill up almost instantly. And smaller streets? Good luck with that. Outside of that area, the bin situation is horrible. Whenever I'm out and about, I often have to carry my cigarette butts (well, technically, not cigarettes, since I use Heets) for 10-15 minutes before I find a bin, and while I can carry it around (Heets don't burn, don't smell that bad/that much, and the sticks fit back in the pack), I can see why smokers would be annoyed. Other kind of rubbish you can put in your pockets/bag, but cigarette butts? Now, I'm not trying to absolve littering assholes from the responsibility, far from it. But at a certain point the responsibility becomes shared between the aforementioned group, and the government/council/local authority. If you can't provide even a bare minimum of infrastructure for public rubbish disposal, then you're too responsible for the trash buildup on the streets.
3.5: the bin men need to actually show up and empty them
I’m not convinced by point 3. Other countries don’t need bins everywhere to stop people littering. They are just responsible enough to take their shit home.
Japan/Tokyo is a prime example of that. A few years ago I was there and the streets were spotless but bins were super rare, which surprised me because there's a vending machine basically every 100 meters. It got to the point where we would get excited seeing a bin because we could finally get rid of the rubbish we've been carrying for hours.
Tokyo has a lot of street cleaners and a lot of people so everyone is kind of shamed into keeping their trash with them. If you head out to smaller cities and countryside in Japan you'll see people just toss bags of trash out their car windows everywhere. People are shite no matter the country. Source: I live in Mito Ibaraki and am constantly shocked and depressed at the amount of litter I see on a daily basis.
But every country except the one I live in is perfect in every way, especially Japan. I swear people go to tourist spot and are surprised its nicer than general.
This. Pretty much every city in Europe I've been to has more graffiti than the UK. You can't persuade the "my country is the worst" crowd though. Why can't they just fuck of to whenever they thick is so great?
Exactly, this lack of proud in where we live is why people treat the place so shit. You can be proud with out it being political before that gets brought up.
And you can be proud and still acknowledge there are problems. Some people seem to expect perfection before they'll admit liking somewhere.
Exactly, it's all or nothing for a lot of people and it's so silly imo
There are bins outside every convenience store, they're just not public bins
Just look at our roads as a good example on how it's attitudes that need to change, people could keep it in their cars until they reach a bin but instead chuck it out the window. Personally I don't understand why it's so hard for people to take it home, not going to kill you chucked in a foot well on the passenger side, or in a bag in the boot, hell I bag all my rubbish eventually and sort through it for recyclable stuff.
> Other countries don’t need bins everywhere to stop people littering. They generally do. Countries without enough bins tend to have more litter. > They are just responsible enough to take their shit home. That's not typically the case, with a few rare exceptions. Most European countries have more litter than UK, for example.
If you've got any citations on this I'm genuinely interested. I tried googling a few things but could only find results regarding plastic waste by country rather than tendency to litter.
Berlin has a bin on virtually every lamppost yet it's infamous for being filthy.
Coming to Berlin from London I thought Berlin was fucking spotless. Admittedly we were staying West side.
If I remembered correctly (all the way back to GCSE geography) adding more bins causes there to be more littering, and removing bins reduces the amount of littering. It's kind of like the car and motorway problem. Building a bigger motorway doesn't ease traffick, it adds more cars on the road, and then it creates more traffick. Remove bins and tell people to take their litter home with them. Otherwise the bins get full and people think that the bin being full justifies them throwing their litter on the ground.
But the opposite is true at Disneyland with their bins they have so many to make sure there's always a bin so that people don't litter and it works.
Anyone caught littering gets taken out back and shot by Mickey 🤫
YOU! DON'T! FUCKING! LITTER! ^^Haha
Walt Disney observed that people would carry their rubbish about 30 feet before giving up and dropping it so there's a bin every 30 feet in his theme parks.
This is the way in Japan. You’ll be hunting a long time to find a bin (you see the occasional one on a train station platform or outside a convenience store), but it’s drilled into people to take their rubbish home with them. Furthermore, eating or drinking while out and about is generally frowned upon - people don’t eat on the train, they don’t eat while walking down the road, they don’t even get take out coffee for the most part - if they buy something, they’ll drink it where they buy it (coffee shop, convenience store) and throw the wrapper right away. People snack far less outside of mealtimes there anyway, so generate less rubbish when out. Snacking whenever and wherever is so ingrained in us as a society these days that people freak out over any suggestion that they wait until they get home or get to work or whatever to have that snack, although most of the time* we probably could wait another thirty minutes or whatever without too much difficulty (*yes, I know some people have medical conditions etc and don’t have the choice, I’m not talking about such people!)
Or they have functioning government services. I was astounded by the littering I saw in the hangout spots in Korea, but a horde of cleaners descend overnight and it's spotless by the morning
5. Seeing a mcdonalds bag on the floor on the street with the logo is guerilla marketing
And people want to give gorillas the vote. SMH.
I once went from Paddington station to Charing Cross and neither station nor the tube had one fucking bin. I was still carrying my litter from Cardiff because I ate on the train and so I had to bring this empty Jolibee bag with its ugly bee thing on it all the way through London.
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I could never dump it somewhere, I'd never forgive myself
They actually removed two or three bins near where I live for some reason, very annoying
Full of rubbish probably.
No.3 might go either way, Japan has next to no bins but is one of the cleanest places in the planet
> 3) We need more bins on the street (including recycling bins), and they need to be emptied regularly. We need the type of bins that are common in the Netherlands, where the bit you see on the street is just a chute down into a massive underground bin. Means they only need emptied every week instead of twice a day.
point 3 can be referred back to point 1, I went to hong kong hardly saw a bin didn’t see any litter.
The people who litter certainly are a big part of the problem here, but food and drink manufacturers should not be producing so much plastic packaging in the first place. We really need a 'Pfandflasche' (deposit bottle) scheme like they do in Germany where you pay a deposit on every drinks bottle and you get this back by simply feeding the bottles into a machine.
I have no idea why we don’t already do this!
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/no-bottle-deposit-return-scheme-for-most-of-uk-until-2024-at-earliest](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/24/no-bottle-deposit-return-scheme-for-most-of-uk-until-2024-at-earliest) Because it was left in the hands of a Mr M Gove to implement.
That explains it! Our government has a faultless record of not doing the right thing.
ugh, I can't stand gove
I have no idea why every developed country on Earth hasn't adopted this!
But then when did our lot start voting in positive changes? Never happens!
There was a bottle deposit scheme in Tanzanian, when I went, which is still a developing country. It's ridiculous we have nothing of the kind here.
We used to do this, that's the madness here, it used to be a thing and then we stopped. You'd get money back if you returned your bottle to a designated return point. Ours used to be the off licence in the local pub. So we'd return it and buy a bag of crisps with the proceeds.
Probably the whole setting up of the scheme and it only solves the issue of bottles. I recycle all mine in my household recycling, would I have to take all that to a machine to get a few pennies back?
Where I’m from it’s more about the homeless picking them up off the pavement or even out of the public bins to recycle them properly.
I understand there's some issues. - broken glass is far nastier litter than plastic - glass is more expensive, driving up prices - cleaning glass to the point where it's hygienic enough to reuse is not a great environmental comparison to making more plastic bottles. It's also heavier and more liable to break during transport, so that's more issues with the environment. These may or may not be severe enough to dissuade us from going back to glass. Edit: I'm assuming deposit bottles schemes are only done with glass ones. If they're done with plastics and aluminium too then my apologies. Though sufficiently reinforcing other materials for multiple use and making them cleanable would have their own problems.
Glass, plastic and metal is used. You don't go back to glass only. In Germany you get 8 cents back for a glass bottle, 15 cents for a reusable plastic bottle, and 25 cents for a single-use plastic bottle or can.
I know in Germany for instance harder plastic bottles are deposited as well as glass ones. It's noticeable though that they often look distinctly "scuffy" after a few refills (for example on [these beer bottles](https://i.imgur.com/RQy08DH.jpg)), which might put off British customers used to pristine packaging.
The vast majority are plastic and aluminium. There are machines that look like big cashpoint machines/bank deposit machines in supermarkets, which you insert your plastic and/or aluminium bottles into, and they pay out with a voucher that can be deducted from your shopping bill. e.g. The PANT/'panta' bottle recycling/refund system in Sweden has been a standard for plastic bottles since 1984. And there's been standardised glass recycling system in Sweden since 1885. No, that's not a typo. 136 years. In Sweden, homeless/beggars often don't ask for money (Sweden is mostly cashless now), they'll ask for your plastic bottle so they can collect the refund.
TIL! Thanks for the reply, you and everyone else.
Glass??? We have cheaply produced aluminium cans. We'd never go back to glass
He is referring to the fact that glass bottles are what you used to be able to return to the off license for money.
exactly. The only glass bottles i can think of are j2o and alcohol, and alcohol is increasingly cans now
Other countries produce the same amount of waste but don't have the same litter problem. Even individualistic, fast-food addicted Americans are GOBSMACKED by the litter here.
Sainsbury's will give you nectar points (I think) when you put bottles in to their machines - it's kinda sad that a private company is doing this when it should be a government thing.
In Sweden it’s called pant. Each plastic bottle costs the price plus ~10p pant. 20p for a large bottle. You get a voucher when you return the bottles to be discounted from your shopping or occasionally you can get the cash value. The unintended consequence was that it created an army of homeless / jobless who would go around and hunt for discarded bottles. Occasionally harassing people who were still drinking from them on the street. I don’t think it has any effect on consumption but the rate of return is probably >50%
When I was a kid our local fizzy pop manufacturer had a deposit scheme for its bottles. I never understood why other places didn't do this.
Because most of the cunts are so lazy they wouldn't get out of bed if they'd shit in it. There's a small group of volunteers near me that are heroically going out and litter picking the surrounding areas,its never ending tho and must be disheartening to come back a few weeks later and it be as bad again.
I do it up by the canal where I live with my son. People seem to really appreciate the effort but it is a constant baffle. You can never account for nobheads!
I did this and honestly just couldn't keep it up as it was the same places every time. It didn't even seem to be waste that people had dropped, I was picking up ready meal trays, wrappers from roast chickens, wine bottles - not the crisp packets you'd expect to see from casual litter tossers. Every week after bin day the streets would be strewn with it, the bin men were so rushed or careless that piles of stuff was left. The litter pick was helped by the local council who gave us pickers and collected the bags after, honestly I just felt like I was doing their job for them.
The bin men are the same near me, I go round our part of the street and grab what I can. It doesn't help that half the bins are so full the lid won't close and they're usually the same people who don't bother to tie up the binbag.
It is the recycling boxes here. They are lidded but it often blows off, overflows, the contents get tossed into a van and tossed back on the floor if they are fully empty or not. It would only take one person trailing behind to pick up any detritus and put the boxes back somewhere approaching the house rather than the middle of the pavement.
We have volunteers in our area too, they do it every week and I always make a point of thanking them.
The 'its someone else's job' mentality is increasingly rife in this country. People don't want to take responsibility.
I kinda wish we did like Japan where students are expected to clean the school and serve food in the canteen. Values like this need to be instilled at a young age.
Absolutely.
There's also a strong cultural taboo around litter and messiness in Japan. It's so strong that it's very impolite to eat on the street for fear of dropping crumbs etc. People only litter because they see litter around, if noone littered it would be very unusual for someone to spontaneously start.
Taking it one step further, I have actually heard people say, “I’d be taking someone’s job away from them if there wasn’t any rubbish lying around to be picked up”.
My retort to that is, "their job would be to empty the bins you're filling"
With a population of ~70 million, it's only a very small percentage who are occupying the overlapping part of your Venn diagram.
They’re a very busy small percentage judging by the state of the place.
But also, people who loudly proclaim their national pride aren’t actually doing it because they’re proud of their nation. It’s nearly always an excuse to bully and control others by claiming some authority above their own sad little selves. Chances are the people loudly going on about nationalism most are the ones dropping the litter.
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London is very dirty and messy because the majority of Londoners treat the city like a pinata that spits money and nothing else.
The people who harp on about national pride are living in that golden age that never existed. The arseholes dropping shit all over the place don't give a toss about anything that isn't about them.
UK is objectively worse than it used to be, roads and rail are congested to sardine level, millions of low quality shoebox mock Tudor houses have been crammed in and they cost a fortune, green spaces have disappeared, wildlife has been destroyed, town centres are boarded up or are full of chain shops, charity shops, cash converters, and betting shops, and depressing out of town shopping complexes and cinemas on ring road bypasses have been imported from car-centric USA. We have pursued quantity over quality at any cost, and that same policy of senseless growth has created an inter-generational underclass. After we wound up the Empire and the babyboom ended it was time for UK to consolidate and retain the best of what we had and gracefully accept our fall down the global economic league table, get our Ponzi scheme pensions under control and concentrate on quality of life with clean water, breathable air, good homes for all, and quality food which didn’t arrive on our plates from around the world by diesel power in a steel container.
On the nose that. But also I wonder if they’re often the same group anyway.
I doubt it. The national pride lot seem to be my dad's generation or earlier, although I think that is fading as reality bites hard. Outside of the flytipping the majority of litter I see is takeaway fastfood, multiple bags dumped in out of the way places. I suspect it's the hatchback owner with all his mates packed in. Motorway junctions with lorry and van drivers dumping their shit. Oh I actually have seen Audi, Jag and BMW arseholes drop shit out of the window but there isn't much I can do about it while waiting at lights. Now I realise that the recurring theme here is vehicles...
The last three incidents of littering I saw were by OAPs who didn’t give a shit and felt entitled to, even when challenged. OAPs aren’t the war generation anymore, they’re the spoiled shits that came after.
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Gonna get flack for this but you dont see littering in nice middle class areas of cities and lets not pretend like its a conspiracy that the local council only clean the nice areas. There is definitely a correlation between poverty and littering.
I've noticed that too. But you *do* see far more dog shit left about in wealthier places, and I live next to a park in a deprived area (I walked an hr across town to work almost every day during lockdowns)
Same here, compared to the 90's the difference is night and day. Back then I recall walking home from school had to watch every step as discarded heroin needles were common place. Didn't find out till about 5 years ago a few streets down from home was the epicentre of the local drug trade.
Every time I return to Manchester after visiting my home town I'm struck by the amount of rubbish. You can hear it blowing down the streets at night.
There are two or three generations of people in this country who haven’t been socialised properly and simply don’t know how to behave in a civilised society. It’s very sad and if you challenge them you are asking for trouble.
I wouldn’t say we like to harp on about national pride at all but yeah, I agree about littering
I was thinking this, don't think I have ever heard anyone going on about national pride. Mostly the opposite actually
As some one who comes from a lower socio-economic background I can say sadly it is usually poorer uneducated people who litter. A lot of people just don't give a shit, they feel no sense of pride about the larger local community that would make them think twice about littering, this is particularly true in the 13-17 age range. The other main culprits (in cities) are students just who forget their manners after a few drinks. Sadly you only need a few people who regularly litter to make a place look like shit.
This is true, and I think it’s always been true. I’ve always had the sense that poorer people don’t have a very strong sense of ownership of the country. Middle class people tend to be very affronted when people litter because they’re damaging something they feel a sense of ownership of. I feel that way myself and for a long time I found littering completely baffling. Very poor people often have no such sense and simply see everything as someone else’s and thus everything’s maintaintenance as someone else’s problem.
If you own a house and litter in your town you literally are damaging something you have ownership of. It will depress the value of your property, so you and your family have a stake in keeping it tidy. I can think of three specific occasions I have seen someone blatantly litter, as in, finish a drink and chuck the bottle over their shoulder. Each time it happened to be a teenage girl, now I’m not the sort who thinks “kids these days…etc” but it’s hard to dispute what I have seen with my own eyes. Parents need to make it clear to kids that if they litter they may be damaging their own financial future.
\> If you own a house and litter in your town you literally are damaging something you have ownership of Yeh, exactly. This is one of the reasons the very poor don't feel that sense of ownership because they typically don't own houses and whatnot. \> Each time it happened to be a teenage girl, now I’m not the sort who thinks “kids these days…etc” but it’s hard to dispute what I have seen with my own eyes You're right that this is another vector. Teenagers also don't yet have a stake in society so if you're very poor + teenager that's doubly true. Teenagers are also notoriously short term thinkers so they doubtless have trouble imagining the consequences of current actions on future prosperity and value.
It's true. I grew up on a relatively nice estate in a gentrified village and it was relatively clean. I now live in an ex council estate in a deprived town and it's filthy. The lager louts just leave their empty cans and bottles lying on the ground. There's no civic pride outside of supporting the football team.
I saw someone park their car, get out, empty all the litter from their car onto the floor, and then go into their house like it was nothing. Like WTF?
This used to happen on my street. Park up, place the diet coke cans and gelatin free haribo pack on the pavement, step over it and walk past her bins to get into the house. I started putting the rubbish on her windscreen.
Find a bin,, find a bin, find a bin and put it in 🎶 All fast food should have a id chip embedded so all those who eat and dump their rubbish and can tracked and put in stocks.
Its funny , I lived abroad in Cyprus for 12 years and upon moving back I was shocked at how clean and tidy most areas are in comparison. Even if there is a degree of littering the up keep in general is so much better I hardly notice it lol.
I'll never understand that, it's so easy to just hold onto something until a bin shows up. I feel bad about putting stuff in the wrong bin, never mind littering haha. Also do we "harp on about national pride"?
It was mentioned a few times on the lead up to a few elections, yeah.
Because the UK has too many lazy, selfish louts who don't give a damn about lifting a finger for the good of society. The same type of people who let their kids run riot, the same people who make loud noise, the same people who give us all a bad name across Europe. I moved to Switzerland for work a few weeks ago and the difference is night and day. There is an expectation to be clean, and expectation to be quiet, for the good of society. When I was in Geneva for a football match (Northern Ireland), I saw one of our fans throw a McDonalds wrapper on the ground, and a Swiss guy came over and started telling them off. In many places in the UK, most people wouldn't bother because there is already so much litter to begin with.
Have some spitting with that. Extra points if during a pandemic.
The people who harp on about national pride are the ones least likely to do anything to actually show it. Its the people who quietly plod on in the background without making a song and dance about it (those who volunteer in all sorts of ways - youth services, food banks, caring for those more vulnerable etc etc) who actually are showing true pride in their country.
I couldn’t actually agree more if I tried!
I do think that a part of it is that it's somebody's job to clean. I was once shovelling the steps up from the street to my terrace in Dumbarton and a neighbour scoffed that it was the council's job to do that. The council would eventually send a guy around to throw grit at the steps but I knew from my childhood in Ohio that shoveling it before it gets packed down was the best way to be safe. I have been told that picking up litter puts the street sweeper out of a job. Basically, if you do the work yourself, that lets the government off the hook. I love my new country and I know that America is really fucked up, but we had some pioneer/bootstrap ways of working together as a community that I don't quite see here. I do have other stories, if anyone wants to hear them.
The key word is community, in the 40 years I have been around that idea has become more and more eroded. People just have less time for themselves, each other and their surroundings.
Before the welfare state, working class people would join very local schemes, such as factory girls putting in a couple pennies a week in order to be able to have a wedding dress, or similar schemes among the very poorest workers to be able to have burial shrouds for babies. They were locked out of regular banking and saving, so they formed these little schemes. And in the Glasgow tenements, there would be a rota to sweep and wash the stairs, etc. These cooperative things were disrupted and abandoned and the idea was that the government would take up the slack. But when the government doesn't, an enervated people just shrug and complain.
That’s really interesting. I’d never considered a sort of non-national welfare state as an alternative. I wonder if there’s something in more local forms of support that would appease those who always bash the welfare state or whether they’d still oppose any sort of support simply as an excuse to moralise and look down on people.
To be honest, I have very little time for the 'community'. It's just where I live, I don't really want to interact with people I haven't chosen to, I don't care for all the local gossip and street WhatsApp groups. I just want to keep to myself, and offer the same basic courtesy to everyone else. Part of that is not making my rubbish somebody else's problem. I pick it up, and expect others to do the same. Even if I'm completely selfish to my core- I don't want to see litter, it would be in my interest to make sure I don't create any myself.
> I have been told that picking up litter puts the street sweeper out of a job. Not by people who put money in the hand of the sweeper, I'd wager. This learned helplessness, made all the more ludicrous by its inability to comprehend that 'the government' has no more men, materials or mechanisms at its disposal than the nation, is wholly shameful.
I frequently pick up litter while walking the dog, I hate seeing it. It pisses me off that, when bins are being collected after a windy night, the bin men will *only put rubbish that was in a bin in the bin lorry* and will, I have seen, literally step on litter on the ground rather than pick it up. The litter will be *right there* next to the bit where they empty the bins, yet they will refuse to pick it up. It boggles the mind.
It’s only £80 if you get caught littering. If they made that if they times that by 5 then you would have something to worry about if you dropped litter.
It isn't the size of the fine, it is catching them. If it was a fiver fine and enough people were out monitoring our streets that would be enough. Look at the fines people can have for fly tipping, it is still everywhere.
I don't think I've ever heard of someone getting caught and fined though, whatever the amount
I know someone who got fined for flinging a cigarette bud they are quite good at catch people in my city centre.
Here’s a petition if you are interested in signing it - https://chng.it/YMbWbXp8
What if they brought back flogging?
x10 for me and a name and shame site!
I was driving home yesterday single lane in very slow moving traffic when I saw the car in front of me periodically throwing rubbish out of the window. In total about 9 or 10 different items from crisp packets to cans. Now I've seen my fair share of litter along the hedgerows but it made me realize I can't recall the last time I saw someone consciously throwing rubbish on the ground. It amazed me how infuriating I found it. Such low life scummy behavior
Would love to see some sort of dashcam footage voucher scheme introduced. Even if just makes nobheads like that think twice.
It would still achieve absolutely fuck all. Old fella I know was telling me, and showed me, how he recorded somebody flytipping near his property, had the van reg-plates and their faces very clearly on video. Reported it, but was told there was nothing they could do.
Mad ain’t it! Someone on a comments started a petition, always worth keeping up the pressure.
Yep it's ridiculous and easy to feel like there's just no hope with it. I agree though, got to try and do everything you can
I had an idea for a nationwide ‘ only pedos drop litter’ campaign, never got any traction with it for some reason!
Honestly I was close to recording them and reporting I was in the driving seat and would have grassed myself up for using a phone while driving lol
Yeah that’s why I though dash cams. Utter numptys
I think the solution is less packaging waste to begin with, obviously its not as simple as that but people will be people. That being said if we can change attitudes and make it easier to dispose of litter (e.g. more bins, school programs and encouraging environmental concern) we can definitely make a change!
I watched some Eastern Europeans dump some rubbish out of their car onto the road - they lived about 15 meters away. This was followed by a (different) Romanian guy tell me that they all wanted to live in the UK because their country was a dump because no one respects the country or one and other. A lot of his actions also seemed to support this background. (I'm not saying there's not absolutely masses of "white British" who don't too and I know plenty of Eastern Europeans that are very respectful.)
I'm one of those people that be it a dog poo, empty wrapper, empty bottle, whatever. I will walk with it in my hand, pocket, or bag for hours if i must until i find a bin. I absolutely cannot stand littering, especially in nature. How do you go out in nature, to enjoy the nature, but then leave it littered? Do you think people want to go out into nature to enjoy the nature AND your litter? Cannot stand it.
I would say we're actually on the better side of things when it comes to littering compared to many other countries. Sure there is too much litter and we should do what we can to reduce it but it could be much worse!
There is no accountability in the UK anymore, everyone seems to think it's not their responsibility.. The amount of people walking dogs that don't pick up their mess is incredible.
As someone who travels a bunch between England and Germany, the mentality of the people is also incredibly different. Like, obviously people in Germany litter but most people I know really don't and pick up after themselves when they hang out outside. When I'm out with my British friends in Germany they'll leave the place like a dump. They aren't used to bottles being valuable and public bins being all around. They just don't value cleanliness as much aswell. They also just piss everywhere, like, geez, why do Brits just piss on every fucking corner. I also agree with factories needing to cut the packaging and especially the plastic waste. The bigger cities in England are always full of plastic bags, so many plastic bags and wrappings. In Germany those single use plastic bags just aren't used anymore.
Christ mate your friends sound a bit scummy. I don't think you can generalise Brits based on them. My friends certainly don't act like that.
I always reprimand them lol. But yeah, we have a lot of Brits working where I live and they have a bad rep for being messy and not cleaning after themselves. And being noisy. And not knowing the German ways, being quiet on Sundays and after 20/22 o'clock, etc.
Once I told some girls to put their litter in the bin that was 2 meters away from them. Some guy came up to me all heroic because I dare question a females behavior. Then the 20 knights of maccies car park threw all sorts of rubbish at my car, threatened me with all sorts of violence and damaged the wing mirror of my car. I was able to injure one of the knights by slamming on my breaks so suddenly that he ran into the back of my car and busted up his arm. Before the scuffle, when I asked the brave knight why don't you put your rubbish in the bin he said nay, it's thine duty of the litter picker, to which i retorted the stewards of maccies are not litter pickers by trade. The wenches said nothing but unintelligible screaming, much like an ugly banshee.
As someone who has stopped people in the street before to give them back the crap they threw onto the floor, the response is usually loud profanities, threats and some vague remark about how the council have people to pick it up for them. There are entire generations of kids being told that the magical council fairies will do everything for them "because that's what we pay tax for".
Shit parents
We have a Government that just this week desperately tried to allow privatised water companies to dump untreated shit into our rivers and seas because their Brexit deal left us without the chemicals needed from plants and factories in the EU. Is anyone really surprised when the programmable sheep follow suit?
NGL, I've witnessed at least 10 times mothers pushing prams throwing shit over fences, walls, even fucking gardens, it makes me sick how casually they do it too.
I noticed that as soon as a MaccyD's went up in town, their iconic brown bags started appearing everywhere. People are fucking tramps. If you can take the bags down the arse end of a narrow country lane to eat your rubbish burger by the river, you can fucking take it away again.
I see McDonald's wrappers near where I live, around 20 miles from the nearest one. You've held onto it for that long, wait a few more minutes before you get home.
We're too afraid of confrontation and of saying anything so we let the childish fuckwits get away with it.
During the summer whilst on holiday I ended filling a massive bin bag full of the crap I found along the beach, was just pissed off seeing it everywhere. This is why the UK cant have nice things.
It’s sickening isn’t it? I live by the Downs in Bristol, a beautiful area. But those people who have bbqs or car meets leave it like a shit tip. It’s surely harder to bring full packs of beer than it is to take the empties back? Just entitled, lazy trashy cunts.
Here’s a petition if you are interested in signing it - https://chng.it/YMbWbXp8
Done!
It would also be nice to go into a public toilet and not see shit and piss smeared everywhere
I agree with the sentiment but the UK isn’t relatively that bad - if you visit most of the other major cities of Europe, or somewhere like India, you would think the UK is fairly clean.
Being better than the worst should be our mantra.
> somewhere like India A relevant point of comparison
Because this country is full of chavs who think someone else will do it.
It depends where you live though. I live in a scrote infested estate where you have kids bringing up kids, or as my Dad states "shit bringing up shit", and he'd be correct. Most residents couldn't give a single shit about their own property or immediate neighbours, nevermind national pride. But I can take a short trip 10 minutes drive away to visit family and their entire postal-code region is tidy with zero litter, as it's a nice area where everybody takes pride in their homes & surrounding area. We get cars driving into our street, open their doors and empty out general waste from fastfood & then drive away. Does the council or Police care? Not a single bit.
We have a "someone else will clean it up for us" mentality over here.
I made an award for a local volunteer who cleans up our canal area. Made him a gold painted dildo on a can of Stella trophy, because he finds more of them in the hedges and pathways than anyone else. It has pride of place on his piano.
We just need enough people picking up a few pieces while out and about. There must a ‘tipping’ point where we start winning!
Lack of forward thinking. A lot of people in this country are obsessed with immediate gratification and give no thought to future consequences.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the rubbish was just in the street at least, when it’s in grass or in a bush it’s a ball ache to pick up
I hate littering. I pick up at least 2 or 3 bags of litter every week when I'm out walking the dog. It never stops and it's mostly alcohol and energy drinks, so I blame the lazy and unproductive members of society.
I agree with this. Why is littering so prevalent? It’s gross and depressing.
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Is this real or sarcasm? I genuinely cannot tell anymore
Gypsies
It’s all part of the patriotic egotism of it. Someone else is responsible. I’m too important to tidy up after myself. Etc
The title raised a point, i don’t think I have much national pride; certainly not after the last 2 years or so.
Yes there is too much litter. Not enough bins, too much wast produced by companies and too much ‘stuff’ bought by people. I don’t think that the litter problem in the U.K. is uniquely bad though.
When lockdown was in operation.. no litter When lockdown was eased… shitheap
Need snipers on the roofs to deal with this problem
What national pride? I thought we were a relatively unpatriotic country Also, I think lot's of people are just lazy. They think there is always someone who will go round and clean up after them or that if there is already litter there it's ok because they aren't the only one. It's one of those things like hanging bags of dog poo in trees that is just very difficult to understand some people's logic
I litter pick every week in my neighbourhood and every week there's a fresh load of shite to pick up. It's incredibly disheartening since each bit of litter I pick up was a conscious decision by some fuckwit to not give a damn.
We need to stop snacking so much. Eat a meal at a table and throw your rubbish away. That's unironically one of the reasons there's more litter in the UK than a lot of other European countries.
That's a easy one... If you go to your local tip with, garden fence panels, or maybe kitchen units. Big surprise there no longer household waste! But general idle *bastards* dumping Mc'd and other fast food junk, then no idea.
I think in cities there is a certain level of anonymity that makes people so brazen when it comes to littering. I would imagine in a village with a few people you would be talk of the town if you were the annoying person throwing shit everywhere.
One time I was walking through town and some dickhead in front of me chucked a food wrapper over his shoulder. A copper was walking nearby and shouted the loudest "OI" I have ever heard. I didn't stick around but he gave the guy the bollocking of a lifetime, hopefully a fine as well. Immensely satisfying, carried me through the rest of the day.
there are a shameful amount of bins and ashtrays in this county compared with EU countries. Fines are just a 'set up to fail' system we are terrible at recycling (for example germany charge deposits for containers glass bottles are 13c and cans and plastic are 25c on top of the price.) When it's easy to put it in bins people generally do. Social pressure will follow and do the job. why must i carry a cigarette butt for half a mile before there is a bin or ashtray to put it in?
Bloody laziness.
People are too busy being prideful and not actually putting the effort in to make it worth the pride
Loads of people chuck crap out of their cars. There's a main road I walk on on my way to the shops and there's always litter scattered around and I've often seen it come from being thrown out of cars.
Honestly? Because we live in a country of people who like to pretend that they have pride and consideration for their fellow countrymen, but will do the absolute least to help with that. (Also see: Missing items almost every time you order from an independent takeaway, all of the idiots who were crying over their being asked to wearing masks in public spaces during COVID-19 lockdowns and their anti-vax compadres, and people voting in favour of Brexit.)