As I have travelled the highways and byways over the last few weeks I have noticed the accumulation of vast amounts of general litter on the verges and in the hedgerows. This does appear way worse than it ever has been.
Stopped briefly at a Little Chef car park; which I am also informed is a meeting place for local 'hot shot pilots', and it was an utter disgrace. Would certainly have put me off even going into the place. Although a bin is provided they do not appear to have any strategy for a staff member to nip round on a regular basis. And of course it breeds. Its the broken window syndrome, once one is broken the whole neighbourhood goes downhill.
Do we just expect the council to go round picking up everyone's mess? They will be a bit busy with pothole filling for a long time and then there are the budgetary cut backs.
This country is becoming a mess in more ways than one. Have we no pride at all?
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Funnily enough, FC, I was thinking about this yesterday.
I went to our local B&Q and while I was there I had a bacon roll from the girl with the catering van.
I went to the back of the car park to eat it and was disgusted by the amount of litter there.
At that point, the car park shares a boundary fence with the Metrolink Tramway and the fence heads upwards to the road bridge over the rails.
It looked as someone had been fly-tipping over the fence onto the railway bit and litter had been dumped in the same area of the car park.
I'm certainly going to bring it to the attention of the manager next time I'm in and also the leaking drain from one of their staff washrooms which floods part of the parking area all the time. I've been a customer for many, many years and I now can't remember a time when this drain didn't leak....I've told them about it a few times but no-one does anything.
You'd think they would, it's right outside the entrance !!
It seems to be symptomatic of people today just to chuck stuff away and let someone else sort it out. A few more spot fines might help but I think things are moving that way now with massive fines for fly-tippers.
A disgusting, antisocial thing to do !
Ted
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For some reason where I am at the moment (west Wales) is worse than I ever remember it - in fairness I see Council staff and other people picking at it but it's a losing battle- I hate litter and dog poo is the worst sort.
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Not necessarily relevant, but I once read that 90% of litter on pavements is smoking related. I considered this to be very unlikely until the next day, when I decided to look at the debris I was walking past and, lo and behold, the vast majority of litter I saw was indeed smoking related. I didn't gather any exact figures, but 90% seemed to be a very realistic estimate.
Maybe once we have everybody on a central DNA database, we can get a 90% conviction rate for pavement litter from the criminal saliva on the cigarette butts :)
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And every dog on the DNA database with owner's details......?
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>> And every dog on the DNA database with owner's details......?
I really wish that we did have that. I get sick to the back teeth of seeing the amount of dog muck on the pavements where I live. The streetlights are set far apart on some roads, and I actually end up walking in the road at night, because there is so much risk of stepping in the muck in those dark spots.
Also very unpleasant for all the parents around here with toddlers that have to continuously steer them around piles of the stuff, unpleasant and completely unnecessary.
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Litter annoys me, it is wholly unavoidable and almost imperceptibly drags us all down.
I just don't grasp why some people want to live in a rubbish-strewn environment, he said struggling manfully to avoid activating the swear filter.
Our highways and byways always look worse this time of year before spring growth, but that is scant consolation.
Like it or not, we now have two or three generations of a benefits dependent underclass who have no regard for anything and anybody, often including themselves.
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I wear a head torch for the very purpose of spotting the organic piles where the street light doesn't reach.... Kids tend to retreat as they think its a CCTV camera, or so they tell me.
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Parents should teach their children not to drop litter. I can only assume that these days they don't.
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One of the things that struck me on the 1939 A1 road trip thread was how little litter and other debris there seemed to be in 1939.
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There have been some complaints in our evening paper over the last few years about chewing gum discarded on the pavements.
If you walk round the city centre you will see small white splodges all over the place.......you wouldn't think the manufacturers could make so much of the stuff.
In fact, it's a small flat lichen that lives on the pavement. I read about it some time ago from a specialist in the subject.
It was more or less brought home to me when I walked off the pavement through a covered area and then back into the open air.
There was none in the covered section, although just as public.
A bad name given, in this case, to the makers of gum !
Ted
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Absolutely right, Ted. Everyone knows the appropriate place to stick your gum is under the seat on a bus or a train so the next person can get it over their legs.
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The road I live on is soooooo clean you could eat ya pies & mash orf of it
There are Dog poo bins which 99% of ppl use but ...
Some roads in Cornwall are literally littered with litter,
especially the roads that lead from the Burger joint to the council estates.
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>> There are Dog poo bins which 99% of ppl use
Don't the dogs mind? Why can't these ppl use their own loos? ;o)
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>>> Don't the dogs mind? Why can't these ppl use their own loos? ;o) <<<
Hahaha! I fell into that (not literally you understand)
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I never see a dog sitting on them, or wrapping up poo into bags so they must be used by people.
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I do a fair bit of walking round the footpaths of Norfolk and often encounter plastic bags of dog poo by the side of the path or even hanging from a branch. Town dwellers walking their dogs seem to have become so drilled in pooping and scooping in the town that they persist in this practice even when they are in the country. One of our local NT properties even has a notice advising dog walkers not to leave bags of dog poo in the lavatories.
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If in life, one accepts that at a minimum, 75% of people are thick, then it becomes so much easier to reconcile one's mind. Of course removal of their popular (sic) daily paper and their Sunny delight, Garage pasties and the like will change them for the better. Well it will, won't it????????
AND they are allowed a vote and to reproduce. Not good.
MD grrrrrrrrrrrrrr
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Just come back from a couple of days working in Dundee. Saw almost no litter on the roadside and the areas I visited. Noticeably cleaner. Would seem to be much more pride in their environment.
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Litter - Ted
