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.

I'd ban all eating in public and have a eating police force patrolling the streets. Straight to prison for anyone caught eating outside. It's the only way you'd stop them. I have a scavenging dog and it's a fucking nightmare.
I'd also have rubbish inspectors doing spot checks on people's rubbish bags. Some fool over road has not only put their rubbish out on the wrong week but it is filled with food and the seagulls or foxes or rats have got into it and it's strewn all over the road. Got to try to walk my dog past it later.
On second thoughts, prison is too good for them, I'd send them straight to the Tower!

The people that produce mass packaging have a role to play as do the people that drop said litter!!

But there are 3 bins on our estate. All were taped up saying not in use / dog poo etc chucked next to them because they were not being collected. Council will not empty or collect it. We pay as an estate for them to be emptied however I would say over 50% of public litter bins near us are either full on a daily basis or have been removed. That is huge around here. The sense of entitlement of I’m creating a job for someone by dropping litter …. Nope!

around here it took 3 weeks and 6 days for them to empty the black bins / most people they were overflowing.

You can go to a recycling centre but you need transport - they are open only 4 days a week 10-4 pm what happens if you work 9-5 pm. And now you can’t just go you have to book in advance and you have to book online!! They say it is to prevent queues but you know what it will just mean people fly tip - we need more bins and bin collection not less…..

I think a lot of it is genuinely blown out of bins on windy days. I notice more of it in the winter when it tends to be windier than I do the summer. I haven’t seen anyone litter for years.

This especially when it is very full or overflowing

We lived near school.
Fucks sake. The amount of sweet wappers, packaging and crisps packs etc we had on front garden was infuriating

I’ve recently moved to the most White British place I’ve lived for the last 20 years and the litter and dog shit is worse here than anywhere else I’ve lived in the UK.

In summer the vegetation hides a lot of it too.

I heard that A-road littering is particularly bad, because due to H&S, they’re required to close a whole lane, with cones, lights, planning & notification in advance in order to work on the verge.

Other proper countries do it with rolling temporary lane closures quite easily.

There hasn't been a nationwide Keep Britain Tidy campaign since the 80s, when there were adverts on the telly that everyone saw. So young children aren't receiving the message if their parents don't care about it.
To compound that, a large proportion of parents in the UK didn't grow up in the UK, and many, many cultures do not find littering socially unacceptable, from countries in Western Europe to the back of beyond. So they definitely won't be teaching their kids not to litter and are very likely to be "modelling" littering behaviour to them.

Probably partly due to the same reason as potholes. The councils have no money to pick up the little.

Maybe they could fill the potholes with the litter 💡

One more thing: People didn't used to eat all the time. They ate at home, so the rubbish went in the bin. There were fag butts everywhere, but not food packaging. Now, you see fat kids walking along eating crisps for breakfast, and swigging out of cans. There's a high chance not all of those will be held, empty, until the nearest bin is reached. Same with people eating in cars. We just didn't used to do it in the same way.

@ByQuaintAzureWasp agree. Big fines

Oddly, I've got just been researching this odd phenomena:

I've just finished driving around Ireland (The Wild Atlantic Way) in a converted van.

A picked up four, FOUR, pieces of litter at my last (wild) park up - and not a scrap anywhere else in two and a half weeks. I visited a ton of ruins, beaches and areas of natural beauty.

I could not participate in my usual form of public service despite my personal commitment to bag up at least two pieces of rubbish per day.

Yet, there are barely any public bins, and the one you get a service station has the tiniest of holes to put stuff through. In fact, it was the hardest part of the trip - getting rid of my rubbish. I practically had to beg places to dispose of a bag here and there.

I'm in NI tonight. Rubbish everywhere, bins a-plenty. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Apparently, bins are privatised in the Republic, but council-managed in NI. Somehow, this explains the phenomena?!

I get what people mean about some countries not having particularly great, or any rubbish into bin habit, some places really are abysmal but..
The litter problem has been here for decades I've been here and it really at the time I arrived could not have been blamed on 10% of population which was mainly in London anyway🙈 and I already that time clocked onto rubbish around which was really quite a surprise for me.

I live in a small market town where people are generally quite community minded but litter is still an issue. There is a path from my road into town and where the litter dropped is pretty much confined to energy drink cans. I'm guessing that's likely to be youngsters who are supposedly the most caring about the planet. We have regular litter pick sessions and a couple of months ago local businesses were asked to get in on the act by cleaning up their shop front areas. Reporting unemptied bins to the Council sometimes helps where bins aren't easily seen by collectors.
I don't get littering at all, drives me mad when I see it. Keep meaning to carry a rubber glove in my shopping bag so I can pick it up and bin it!

I live on a street which has very few pedestrians but lots of cars cutting through. In the couple of years Ive lived here I have found a Nokia 3210 and a packet for a whole raw chicken in my hedge. Who is unwrapping a whole raw chicken and throwing the package out of their car windows? Won't someone think of the salmonella?

I don't agree with your rather aggressive punishment! (not sure how much you're joking if at all? But, the dog thing - oh my goodness, it's a nightmare, the amount of discarded food and takeaways and God knows what my dog pulls out of the bushes or grabs off the street all the time. It's amazing what people throw away, and there's quite a lot of bins where I walk her too! This morning I came across across chicken leg bones, the sauce pot from a pizza and a bag of old food stuffed in a bread bag, left next to a bin ( the bin wasn't full!). Gross, lazy people!

People drop litter because they are dirty selfish arseholes, no other reason. However near me I’m sure some of it is down to council insisting recycling is out for collection before 6am. This means people put it out the night before, where it is often redistributed by scavenging wildlife or windy weather before it’s collected. I’ve also seen recycling wagons shedding items as they drive along and operatives not picking up dropped items. It builds up.

This pisses me off. The number of people I see in my local high street unwrapping a McDonald's or Greggs and just dropping the wrapper on the floor when they are merely meters away from a bin. And of course there's never an environmental enforcement officer in sight to catch them. They're too busy waiting to jump on someone who's tipped the dregs of their coffee cup down the drain. Although one thing I will say is that some areas are very poorly provided with bins. In my local high street,there's a bin about 100 metres,but once you leave the main street,they disappear.