To ask if anyone will admit to littering?

I don’t litter, I don’t want to live in a shit tip, be that my house, street or country.

leaving pizza boxes in a bush is so fucking lazy, if you are so lazy that you can’t find a bin for the boxes or take then home, don’t go eat pizza in a park

I agree that councils don't want to spend on waste collection on an already tight budget - which is why they should analyse rubbish and allocate the cost of waste collection to those who create the material waste - Coca Cola, McD's, Burger King etc and charge a dog shit collection tax on all dog owners, who should be registered.

I hate literring. I used to smoke and while I admit, I did throw a few fag ends away over the years, I always felt bad and actually had a little portable ashtray thing I used to take with me places, or stick my fag ends into my box. Admittedly, it was also one of my reasons to stop smoking - I HATE fag ends and hated being associate with people who threw them.

I consciosuly throw apple cores but ONLY into bushes and never just on the path etc.

Nothing else.

But I have noticed two particularl types of littering that I think are the main culprits:

1 Teenagers> God, they're a nightmare. I see it often (we live near a school) and they're shameless too. tell them to pick it up and they get very aggro. It's that entitled teenage shittiness. I have to assume most of them grow out of it.

2 out of cars. This one I assume is people not feeling they have anywhere else to put it. I have also noticed this seems to be more ofte men than women in that in my personal experience if I see someone throw something out the car window, it's almost always a man not a woman. But that is purely anecdotal, personal experience with zero scientific note taking behind it.

I once saw a tradie and assistant at a red light open the van door, sweep all the takeaway food litter etc out of the van and into the road. Damn right I took a picture and reported them to the police and named the company in the local FB group.

There is a lake near us popular for boating etc and I am staggered at what people leave. Punctured dinghies, tents, BBQs (not even disposable ones!) chairs. People just seem to get up and walk off, leaving it all behind.

Honestly, I dont litter

Not to sound like a dick 😭

But I probably have done so accidentally

local councils definitely don't want the additional spend. I've lived in my area about six years and the amount of public bins has decreased dramatically since then. The worst is bus stops.
What I notice a fair bit of is 'placing' - ie littering but where the item is placed neatly on a bus stop seat or in a door way. Or next to a bin. If it's not in a bin it's littering.
On holiday earlier this year and some of the forestry commission places had got rid of their bins with lots of notices about how it was better for the environment. I call BS; it's money saving. They should charge more for parking and bring the bins back so that people didn't resort to putting the leftovers of their picnic in the sanitary bins.

No I don’t litter. My older brother who loves animals and nature shamed me once as a child for dropping a crisp packet on the beach. Never littered since. If you can carry the food/ drink with you. You can certainly carry the much lighter empty packet until you find a bin

These are good points. Litter collection is disproportionate to the amount produced - so those who produce the most ie fast food /fizzy drinks (especially the big corporates) should contribute massively to waste collection.

If pressed, idiots will reply that they are 'keeping someone in a job' I believe, which is utterly misguided and untrue. I used to watch the roadsweeper where I used to live half heartedly picking stuff up along the road but totally ignoring the mountains of crap the kids at the local college used to dump on the little green by my house on their way back from Asda. Every night after work I used to go out and pick it all up, otherwise the wind would deposit it outside my front door. Crisp packets, plastic muffin boxes, cans of Red Bull..
The worst offenders were the greasy headed young men further up the close. I used to see one of them pushing piles of McDonald's wrappers and cans (some alcohol containing) out of his Audi's footwell - DIRECTLY OUTSIDE HIS OWN HOUSE. How is it even possible to be that thick?? I used to pick it up and lob it into his garden which must have been confusing for him 😐

I chuck fruit bits into the bushes but that's it. I carry a rucksack so just chuck it in there if out and about. I'm sure there are times I have littered, I have absolutely lost one (or 5) drinks bottles in the woods over the years but only by mistake. We often pick up rubbish and chuck it in a bin if we see it, the kids get really into it.

Nope..all I am hearing is excuses

No, never. I am incredulous that any adult would think it acceptable to leave their shit lying around for other people to clear up or step over, absolutely minging behaviour.

I hate people who litter. I did it once as a young teenager. I remember having a bag of those 10p
crisps you got from newsagents and just chucking the wrapper on the floor. I’d always been brought up to use bins so I have no idea what I was thinking. Thankfully I felt so utterly wretched and guilty that I never did it again! The fact I still remember doing it and the exact flavour crisp bag it was shows that it’s etched in my brain!

Our bin men come only once every 3 weeks. So I try my best to keep random litter in the car and dump it in bins at petrol stations/McD/gym etc. It’s easy to say “take your litter home”, but the fact is that bin collections are pretty infrequent now. So people aren’t inclined to take it home. I don’t bring litter home, I dump it whilst out. Never actual littering, but in some kind of bin somewhere. I’ve noticed that most bins are now overflowing as I imagine many people do this. A pp has been bollocked re pizzza boxes - but my council don’t take these in cardboard recycling. They’d need to sit in the non recyclable bin for up to 3 weeks, which is annoying and unhygienic. So hence the disposal problem.

Also tips are becoming really hard to use. Ours is closed for 2 weekdays and also has short opening hours. It should be open 7 days and it should be open until 6pm so that people can easily get stuff to it. Add to this the fact that many tips require booking and the result is that litter disposal is a complete PITA. I have 4/5 people and dog to dispose of litter after. It’s difficult and time consuming so it’s no wonder people litter and fly tip.

What would be the best way to reduce littering? Education? Fines are hard to implement but should maybe more solution-oriented - 10 hours of litter picking for one dropped item. Or a much bigger fine. And one of the biggest culprits is fast food packaging. There should be some kind of penalty on them every time their packaging is found outside a bin.

I know it's considered an offensive word but to my mind the only people who litter are, essentially, 'chavs'. Which is not to malign youths specifically, there are elderly chavs aplenty where I come from in the midlands. They are thick, thoughtless and throughly self-centered but I do have sympathy for them too because they haven't been given the opportunities in life to feel a sense of responsibility to wildlife, a love for nature, a connection to the earth, a sense of pride in thier nation or service to their community. All of which enrich and beautify a person's life.

Also my local city has had a huge influx of people from overseas and I have observed with my own eyes that a much higher proportion of them litter. Hardly surprising as in many countries like India for example, it is not seen as shameful nor anti-social to litter, its completely normal and accepted. All countries and cultures have different attitudes to littering, in singapore its considered a fairly serious crime.

Finally, vile as littering is, people not picking up their dogs poo are far, far more morally depraved and chavvy. And the 'stick and flick' brigade honking through the woods are the lowest of all.

There’s a young woman on Instagram who shows the stuff people leave on Brighton beach and it beggars belief, it really does. Families buy a full set of beach toys, buckets and spades for their kids, and then just walk off and leave it all at the end of the day. She spends her spare time meticulously cleaning everything she collects and donates it to the charity shop. What she’s doing is amazing, but she shouldn’t have to do it.

I'd also be interested to know how much of littering could be accounted for by something similar to what they say about 'panic buying', in that it's not a load of serial offenders but rather everyone else picking up slightly more than usual that causes the issues?

Could a lot of it be due to the accidental blowing away of a crisp packet/kitkat wrapper that has likely happened to all of us at some point adds up and there's a lot less serial litterers than we might assume? I'd like to think that, but not sure it's really true, although I can't say I've often seen people purposely littering (aside from cigarette butts).

To the person who left their pizza boxes in the bush .I'm the one who picked up 8 pizza boxes plus napkins and pots of garlic mayo at a local beauty spot recently because someone could carry them there full but couldn't be arsed to take them away.I was cross that day and every time I litterpick ,and your post made me cross again.

A character in a novel I read years ago said that the definition of middle-classness was someone who found it easier to imagine committing murder than littering.

But I think that's nonsense. I am WC and struggle to imagine a circumstance in which I would just drop something on the ground. It is ingrained in me like cleaning my teeth and thinking people who read Dan Brown novels have something wrong with them.

It's extremely rare to catch infections from pigeons and even less likely when said pigeons are out in the vast open air.

I'm sure I will have done at some point in life, though don't remember any specific event, but certainly not now at 37.

I can say with absolute honesty that I've never consciously littered in my life. I might have accidentally, like dropping a tissue when I've pulled something out my pocket, but never on purpose.

It's nice looking at old film footage of towns in the early twentieth century and earlier, as there's next to no litter and no spray paint graffiti. We look so less civilised than our ancestors.

I don't understand how people can not care about the aesthetics of littering etc. It makes everywhere look horribly scruffy and unloved.

it winds me up.We take our dog on a local country walk 3 miles long,one day it was a mess so I decided to get some bags and a grabber and clear it up.I got 4 bin bags full of rubbish (cans,cups,bottles,poo bags,crisp packets) once someone sees rubbish then it seems like others think oh it’s fine others do it.

it’s disgusting and they’d be the first to complain if someone dropped litter in their garden.

Apple core/similar into an undergrowth is my limit, I don't know how people just walk away from cans/packages or pizza boxes (!!!!!!) or whatever, it's disgusting.

I think one big issue which has become apparent over the past couple of years since this message has been pushed is that most people won't adhere to the 'take your rubbish home if it doesn't fit in the available bins' line unfortunately.

People don't want to take rubbish home, and sometimes it won't be easy to do so (eg if something's open but only half-finished and liable to leak/spill ,such as picnic items) so I do seriously think places need to increase their bin capacity/emptying frequency in line with the number of visitors they can expect.

It's likely a rare occasion that a destination actually experiences a huge unexpected influx completely out of the blue - they know when they're likely to be busy and should manage bin capacity accordingly. That must be possible, but it's additional spend presumably so they don't want to do it.