What is going on with the litter?

[stressedabouthousesitu]

The state of the UK is summed up by the fact that every road is lined with rubbish - driving through pristine countryside every verge is full of beer cans and McDonald’s wrappers. What a depressing state of affairs. Why are people throwing it? I pick up bags of it when out walking my dog. It makes me feel very angry about how little people care for their environment.

every verge is full of beer cans and McDonald’s wrappers

Litter pisses me right off, but the point can be made without the blatant exaggeration.

There will be countless litterers who read this thread so would any of them care to explain why the fuck they do it?

It’s so frustrating, particularly since in my experience those doing it are often the first to complain about the state of the country, how funding is allocated and to whom. We’d have more funding for schools and the NHS if millions didn’t have to be spent on litter picking and fly tipping.

How did you get this experience? I've never had a conversation with anyone who admits to doing it 🤷🏻

It's utterly depressing I agree

Some people simply don’t care about the environment around them (see also: vandalising the children’s playground, pushing shopping trolleys into the nature reserve pond, parking wherever they please.) It often stems from disenfranchisement and a big “fuck you” to society and those around them - they’re mostly not the sort of people likely to be reading MN.

We know why they do it.

You and I must be reading parallel Mumsnets 😄, but I agree with all your other points.

Totally agree but no one ever admits to doing it. It will never be stopped. Even worst is the state of the rivers and oceans, absolute heartbreaking the amount of waste pollution.

Ugh this has been high on my mind in the last couple of days.

Like much of the UK, here in Scotland we had a storm yesterday. Coincided wonderfully with the recycling bin collection day. Cue several neighbours putting their bins out 36 hours early - I mean, why?!

10.30pm Monday night the bins are rolling all over the street and nearly damaging cars. The empty cans, milk cartons and glass bottles are rolling everywhere. I try to ignore it. Determined it won't be me to sort the mess out again. Of course, I can't. So I'm out in my PJs at 10.45pm scrabbling about with other peoples bins, chasing empty packets around the street. I see curtains twitching, so neighbours are clearly aware of the shambles but content to leave it to old muggins here to sort it out.

Up at 6am for work - have to pick more bins up. I don't have time to scrabble about for the litter now that I'm dressed for work and disinclined to get drenched in bin juice again. By the time I arrive home from work, the street is covered in litter. One bit of karma is that it's mainly collected in the gardens of the neighbours who ignored the mess and took their bins out stupidly early in the midst of a storm. We are now 30+ hours and counting and not a single fecking bit of litter has been picked up. They're literally just walking past it when they go in and out of their house. Do they think the fairies will collect it? It sure as hell won't be the council!

~Rant over, and breathe~

Readily apparent from my street’s WhatsApp group and the local Facebook groups.

Christ 😔

That’s a bit dramatic, calm down.

I had a rant about this to my husband yesterday, we have a tree lined hedge around the front of our house and I’m forever finding cans of beer and rubbish in the trees. People are so bloody uncaring and antisocial. Really gets on my pip.

I've been ranting about this too lately. Litter and potholes.

Is it “people” or is it men? Obv women too, but more men litter imo.

I’m gonna be the one to say it - some probably most of it is done by people from countries where they have litter evvvvvvverywhere. My friend has just walked (yes, walked) through Serbia, Romania, Sofia, Bulgaria, Turkey & Georgia and showed us videos of PILES of litter lining the streets - all the streets. Dogs everywhere, rats everywhere, people chucking bags of rubbish out of car windows, it’s vile. This was both rurally and in inner cities. It’s fully normalised and therefore fully normal behaviour to those cultures now. Kids raised seeing their parents and their peers’ parents doing it, so they now do the same.
So I don’t think it’s racist to think & to assume that given allll the different cultures in the UK, that many of them are simply doing the same thing here as what they’ve grown up doing back home 🤷🏼‍♀️ Of course it’s not right! I’m not suggesting it is, I just think this could be why it’s happening. More needs to be done to make it clear to everyone in a multitude of languages (including English of course), that it’s NOT acceptable here.

Actually I think it’s worse in the country than cities maybe as no one clears the verges but where there are houses some local people will do it. The A-roads round are shockingly bad.

Are the 8% the ones that discard litter with hay abandon?

Need to start putting g cameras up and fining people very heavily ... £1000 for first offence

I think there is a minority demographic who do care about nature and the environment and everyone else just doesn't give a shit and they're the ones dropping litter. This country is turning into a rough old shithole and it's the wildlife I feel so sorry for, because litter can kill things. They're probably the types who love fireworks, loud music everywhere, sky lanterns, ordering shedloads from crappy Chinese sites and their kids throw stones at ducks in the park.

It's not new and in fact there has been an explosion of community litter picking groups, so whilst it would be better if they weren't needed, it's not fair to talk about how little "people" care about their environment.

It's mostly men ime. Worked at McDonald's for ten years and spent hours in all sorts of weather picking up rubbish from the car park and surrounding areas. One man threatened me with violence because I asked him to stop throwing his rubbish out of the car window and into the carpark - there was a bin less than ten steps away from him.

I'm city-centre based and there's litter, but it doesn't linger and ordinary people don't have to go around picking it up because we have road sweepers and pavement sweepers. There's one that passes by our house every morning. There's an app where residents can take photos of litter, dog poo or fly tipping and it gets removed within hours.

It's not always people littering, rubbish gets blown by the wind or foxes rip open rubbish sacks (domestic rubbish is left next outside the step of houses here, as there is no front garden for a wheelie bin.) Personally I'm happy for my council tax to go towards cleaner streets, it's more realistic to fund it than expect to be able to change habits of a minority.

Don't be so rude.

I remember the last thread on this. Didn't someone defend their littering by claiming they thought the birds could make little houses out of their pizza boxes?