| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| sally_in_wales |
How to discourage littering?My bit of Wales seems to have a perennial problem with littering, often along roadsides where people clearly just chuck pop bottles and crisp packets out of windows.I know the schools do try to instil a sense that this isnt right into the youngest kids, but it obviously fails by the time a significant number get a bit older and the worst culprits always seem to be twenty-somethings when I spot people in the act. Has anyone ever come across any re-education stategies that have actually worked? |
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| jamsam |
you could always do what my sister did last weekend, shout as loud as you can at the teenager seen dropping litter and then proceed to discuss the poor girls family at top volume untill she was embarresed enough to pick it up!!! | ||||
| MarkS |
Is Brownbear available? | ||||
| Brownbear |
Shooting litter-louts is illegal unless some person can arrange with English Nature to have them listed as either game or vermin. But it must be noted, a person who has been hanged drops no more litter. You could even call it a 'suspended sentence'. |
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| JB |
Are you having a bad day BB? | ||||
| Brownbear |
No, a simply excellent day. I've put the Bartercard rep to flight, I've just taken orders for half a dozen night vision kits, and now I'm about to take Thomas á Bone for his morning constitutional. Nothing to add a final lustre to a good morning like the prospect of topping a few petty criminals or sending Jamie Oliver some nice freerange meat. |
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| Shane |
I think inserting said litter where the sun don't shine is the way forward. Either that, or they should once again allow the neighbourhood bobby to administer a good clip round the ear. Although that will, of course, involve bringing back the neighbourhood bobby first. | ||||
| Chez |
Arvo's elderly great aunt was known for picking up litter that teenagers dropped in the centre of Liverpool, trotting after them with it and giving them a good talking to. They usually went meekly and put it in the bin. I think if more people were prepared to do that, it would become socially unacceptable. | ||||
| Mary-Jane |
I do that...much to Jack's embarrassment. |
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| Mary-Jane |
Oh I'd shoot 'em...along with gum chewers who spit it out on the pavement...and in fact anyone who seems to find the need to spit anywhere in public. |
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| Silas |
Ohh, can't tell you just how much I agree with you here. |
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| cab |
Theres an inherent selfishness in far too many people that makes stopping littering quite difficult I'm afraid. All I can say is that you're better getting 'em young to educate them in all sorts of 'good manners'. | ||||
| Ian33568 |
Whilst in the UK we (a small group of neighbours who were pixxed off with litter) got together with the local council and organised a litter and rubbish collection day - the Council issued litter pickers and gloves, black bags and a truck to take it all away. We leafleted every household in the area and got schools involved. We contacted the press and got a photographer there, needless to say out of the 500 or so leaflets we delivered, about 20 people turned up and a class from a local school. We collected about 40 bin bags of everything you could imagine (and some things you would never imagine!).
It worked well and certainly made a difference in the short term. We got a lot of publicity out of it and repeated the exercise for a couple of years. We hoped that the youngsters would grow up knowing that dropping letter was not a good thing. There were still many assholes walking out of the local newagents, taking the cellophane off their cig packets and tossing it to the wind and adults coming out of the sandwhich shop tossing wrappers and the likes onto the road........good role models not..... 
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| Behemoth |
Excremation.
The responsible party is stripped and then dragged through a sewage treatment primary settlement tank. This reallly annoys but but anything short of large fines, repeatedly applied and publicised will not work. |
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| vegplot |
High powered rifles on CCTV cameras. 
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| Slim |
a bottle redemption program is both an incentive to recycle and not throw out your bottles and cans, but also an incentive to pick up the ones that folks have tossed | ||||
| vegplot |
We used to have, many years ago, deposit bottles (I don't recall the textl marked on the bottle) in the UK. As a child I used to collect them and get the deposit back but that was before they introduced 'no deposit no return' and plastic bottles. |
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| Slim |
our plastic bottles are still deposit bottles. The deposit and return haven't really kept up with inflation at all, as they're still at 5 cents, but it's better than nothing. I'd like to see it go up to 25 cents and a return to re-using thicker glass bottles so we don't have to keep re-melting them when recycling.
I wonder what the energy break down is for thicker bottles being disinfected and re-used versus thinner bottles being melted down and recycled. Have to throw in that the thicker bottles would use more energy in transit, wouldn't they? |
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| Behemoth |
I think they just said return. IIRC it stopped when the fuel costs of collection and cleaning outweighed the costs of the bottle, or something like. |
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| Barefoot Andrew |
Inclined to agree. I've been to places where there's a chronic litter problem caused by the actual people who lived on the street in question. If folk are going to defile their own patch, what hope is there for elsewhere. I once spotted a woman toss a fairy cake paper case thingy out of her car window. I didn't know her, but I knew she only lived round the corner. For a few moments I seriously considered going round to take issue with her, but thought better of it. I'd have been the one coming back het up and in a bad mood. A. Edited to add vaguely essential "car" to "out of her window". |
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| Treacodactyl |
Thing is so many people do it. Even the refuse/recycling collection people don't seem to pick up stuff they drop, which is a real problem when they drop glass bottles and leave broken glass behind.
There was something on the TV last night that suggested getting criminals to wear pink. Perhaps young teenage lads that drop litter should be forced to wear a pink suit for a week while picking up litter, far less street-cred than an ASBO. 
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| vegplot |
Or a nice bright reflective jacket with a bin liner and litter picker and forced to tidy the street for a week. |
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| Yarrow |
what about spraypainting any litterers you see? Tht'd cheer me up.
"Remember kids- Red means Bad." and for glass bottles, giv 'em to a glass blower! Personally, I'd rather do that than pay tax to have them recycled. Because when that happens, Mr Hills sells the glass and makes a profit. In my eyes, that is money directly from the poor to the wealthy. Ooh! Ooh! Maybe one day products will come with less excessive disposable packaging. |
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| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
there is no personal pride or sense of responsibility. Its 'someone else's job' to clear up (why do you think I'm spending 2 days with my kids teaching them - again- how to clear up their rooms and immediate surroundings) | ||||
| Mrs Fiddlesticks |
there is hope - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7254496.stm | ||||
| Yarrow |
what about following a persistent litterer, picking up after them and posting it all back with a letter? Good sport of an hour or two. And if the fear is they'll just leave it outside their house, what about putting it in their bin for them? Fines tend to scare the goddess back into people. | ||||
| dpack |
vermin but direct action is dangeroos and mostly illegal
phone cameras are good ,hassle local environmental services ,local press etc remember an ied is messier than a crisp bag but they only make one final mess as far as suggestion notices i like" please be responsible with your waste ,it is your roadside " or on a harsher note "do not litter ,sniper at work " |
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| dpack |
yep it was a good system |
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| Ian33568 |
Perhaps we could just clone this liitle angel...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/7255333.stm |
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| dpack |
i wonder if she was trained as an assistance dog ?
mine hide things under the bed 
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| wellington womble |
There are some wonderful assistance dogs out there - they do all this kind of thing. Having said that, some dogs just eat socks. Mine, well, mine are cute and fluffy and keep me fit. We used to say they shared a braincell, but I think one of them lost it.
I can't understand littering - I would never, ever chuck litter out of my car window (as anyone who has seen my car will testify) and I would never just drop stuff. mean to put things away and not get round to it, yes, all the time, but I would never just dump it! It's just so thoughtless. |
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| Ani |
I dont mind throwing bio-degradable things such as apple cores, doing the road sides a service-they dont get much fertiliser...but anything else is just selfish! theres a macdonalds not far from my home and my mum is forever picking there litter out the bottom of our hedge from thoughtless people driving past, always tempting to return it thoughtfully back to macdonalds... | ||||
| wishus |
Might as well use this thread about litter...My bus pass is about to expire and, as the weather is quite warm, I've decided not to renew it for a while to save a bit of dosh and get fit. It's a 3-mile walk to work - that's an hour's walking, all residential areas apart from one bit of road that goes over a canal and under a bridge, so pretty safe.I've also started saving up crisp packets for the Walkers Brit Trips offer - I quite fancy taking advantage of a break on a farm somewhere, and for 35 points you can get 3 nights for 2. Now, as my other half pointed out, I would undo all the getting fit by eating lots of crisps, so I've had some of the packets off friends and work colleagues - waste not want not. On the way home, I have noticed there are loads of crisp packets and other bits of rubbish blown into the gardens and hedges along the way - and I noticed quite a few with the current offer. However, I value my health, so I am not going to scrabble about in hedgerows after packets that might be manky... but there were a few on the way home the other day that were just, sort of, in my path, looking recently dropped. So they went in my bag. When I got home, I felt like a right womble, making good use of the everyday things that folks leave behind (and then throwing them away in my own bin), though I felt bad that I couldn't do more about all that rubbish I saw. Then I went to bank my points... and to my disappointment found that some of the packets I had picked up were actually from a multipack, so didn't have the points in the seal. Then I thought, well, all this littering is really bad, but here it's probably some kid who has been given this packet by his mum before being sent to school - and that kind of made me feel even more angry. It's no wonder kids can't think where litter is supposed to go - that's probably their breakfast! I have challenged children who drop litter before, and they seriously think they are providing employment opportunities for someone! |
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| gnome |
yes - i believe the main cause of ignorance (Bushism coming on here) is people not knowing things - usually because they have never been told. people - particularly young people need to be educated. what we need is TV programs (I am reliably informed children like to watch TV) about conservation and the environment. Trivial Pursuit games about green issues would be a good idea. how about a computer game that works on the same lines as Simcity - but you have to run a waste management service - arrange for street to be cleaned, recycle collections, disposal, managing a landfil site etc. | ||||
| Andrea |
One of the first computer games I ever played was called Colin the Cleaner. It was a little pacman type chap who ran around eating litter. Bring back Colin the Ceaner! |
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| Green Rosie |
I found these putting litter game into Google
http://www.cpia.ca/anti-litter/main.php?id=414 http://www.recyclingrangers.co.uk/littergame.htm (But Colin the Cleaner sounds like fun  )
He he - look what I found on YouTube: |
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| Andrea |
Rosie, you're amazing! I'm going to send that link to my Dad immediately
Somehow I don't think it would satisfy the kids of today! |
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| Grimnir |
Personally I think BB's 'uspended sentence' is the best idea. No further offences to be considered m'lud
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| Green Rosie |
Thank you, although I think the credit should really go to who-ever put Colin onto Youtube! I think my 4 and 6 year olds might enjoy it though - they are beautifully ignorant of the likes of X boxes etc and they love all the games on this site |
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| Andrea |
Well I'd have never though to look on YouTube! Although I'm learning fast that you can find just about anything there if you try. We spent an enjoyable couple of hours introducing my eldest son to the music videos of our youth the other day The poor child was bored stiff!!!
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| Green Rosie |
No taste the youff of today
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| gnome |
they do have taste - bad taste. actually, some of the stuff Goff kids listen to aint bad. |