Apparently the Scottish Government thinks so and has totted up the total to a bewildering £25 million. Wow! I wonder what methodology was used and what the confidence interval is? +/- £15 million? [1. A final significant area looked at for this study was the potential for litter to impact house prices. Taking a low end estimate of the possible effect of litter on house prices (where it can affect both the valuer’s and buyer’s perception), and assuming this might apply to just 1% of Scotland’s housing stock, still gave a very significant cumulative figure of £100 million. The Eunomia research team believes this figure should be treated with caution in the Scottish context. However, even if the impact on Scottish house prices is a fraction of the initial estimate, it would still be a figure counted in millions.]
We want our National Litter Strategy to achieve a cleaner, safer environment for people who live in and visit Scotland – where littering is no longer acceptable. The strategy we are consulting on is a package of measures to encourage people not to litter or flytip.
Anyway, if you live in a town, chances are you agree that littering is a continuing problem. Don’t believe what you are told (it is cleaned at 7:00am every morning) – believe what you see (It is not clean by 11:00am). Litter comes in many shapes and forms, though the law takes a different view depending on the form. Urine – a liquid waste doesn’t seem to count, unless a human is passing it! A recent one, as far as I can see is depositing the contents of a unwanted drink in a nice pattern on the pavement or around a bin – it stays there for weeks and weeks if there’s no rain. The law has little to say about this, and I guess all sorts of other sticky deposits. Accidents can happen – hey ho – but question is how do they happen with such regularity? Is it our (vulgar) appetites to consume stuff regardless of the time of day? No doubt that contributes and small whiney children protesting violently that it must have this or that and then throw a fit[2. I am also reliably informed that Community Wardens can only politely ask ‘unders’ (under the age of 18) to pick their litter up and that even the police can only issue a ticket to adults if the the individual refuses to pick up.].
But is increasing fines for littering, as planned by the Scottish Government, the way to tackle an issue that costs tens of millions (and this is an easy fact to calculate) a year to deal with the answer? What if those millions were spent on town and street improvements instead? This is certainly pretty tantalising, but are the litter bugs still reading? Can they read or even do the math?
Zero Waste Scotland reckons that £53 million is spent clearing up litter alone, while more than £16 million is spent on cleanup costs and wildlife rescue along our coastlines. I wonder whether this includes the free cost of people like me that pick up behind litter bugs? Here are some headline points from the report:
- Fifty percent of the population admit to having littered at some point (this is staggering, but I guess includes mostly young people?).
- More than 250 million individual litter items – and more than 60,000 flytipping incidents – are dealt with by public bodies each year (did they count them all, like those holes near Blackburn, Lancashire?).
- Around 25 per cent of Scots – one in four of us – see litter as a problem in our local communities (this is a killer fact, because that means the other 75% are blind to it and therefore don’t).
- Littering by individuals is often habitual … through thoughtless actions (and therefore hard to treat), whilst flytipping … (is) more localised … (and) premeditated and deliberate (so like fraud is always likely to occur, regardless of the law).
Makes you think? Yet many people locally don’t. Litter also has an indirect cost by reducing property values, hitting tourism and contributing to health issues, while greater recycling of plastics and paper could actually add to the value of the economy rather than be a cost. All this according to the report by Zero Waste Scotland.
Increasing fixed penalty fines from £50 to £80 for litter and from £50 to £200 for fly-tipping is proposed. But hang on, did someone also do the research that raising the fines would act as a deterrent? Turn to page 52 to see that it is as much about raising revenue as about deterrent, which is what speed freaks have so successfully lobbied against. Hard also to believe it make any difference around here, where recognition of the problem isn’t really debated rather just brushed onto the sidewalk – so to speak. Anyway if you admit to littering (and apparently half the population do), I suspect you won’t be reading this.
Two separate consultations on land and marine litter have been launched by Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead that propose better education and increased recycling areas as ways to reduce litter.
And here is an infographic for those that prefer the hard facts made easy:
