Gfamily wrote: ↑Fri Jun 19, 2020 11:34 am
Stephanie wrote: ↑Fri Jun 19, 2020 11:03 am
Or... we could have more bins and actually collect the rubbish?
Seems as though that could help solve the issue.
Unless this was just an all purpose grumble thread, in which case, it's in the wrong part of the forum.
There's a basic problem with litter bins in beauty spots, in that they get most use at weekends & Bank Holidays, when the people who empty them aren't working.
When they're full it's going to be tempting to leave bags of rubbish beside them, "so they can be collected next time", but that's not ideal - particularly if containing any sort of waste that would attract vermin.
More bins would help, but then they just 'litter' the beauty spots themselves. Maybe the larger industrial bins could be placed near the carparks and signs saying "if the litter bins are full, please dispose of your rubbish here"
As for fly tipping, we used to regularly get stuff fly tipped in our church car park - generally it was either dumped by a cowboy 'garden maintenance' team or from someone who did 'rip out your kitchen cabinets' work. My assumption was that the stuff generally wasn't dumped by the previous owner, but they'd paid someone to take it away.
On the other hand, other places nearby would get mattresses and old furniture dumped, and i'm not sure its got much worse since the lockdown (probably because people haven't been able to replace them). It's likely to get worse now I guess.
There are other problems too. Many beauty spots are not that close to roads, so emptying bins isn't all that easy. Plenty of people are happy to walk 20 minutes each way to a lovely picnicking spot but it isn't practical to expect rubbish bin emptiers to walk 20 minutes each way to empty a bin.
Also, the volume of litter went through the roof recently. At the reservoir I mentioned before, there is a litter bin in the layby and I don't know how often it is emptied as I never go that way (I run in from the opposite side) but in any case, the local resident I mentioned before collected 4 bin bags full of rubbish from the surrounds of the reservoir less than 48 hours after he'd already collected 2 bin bags full. Even assuming no other rubbish got put in the bin (and it did, it was overflowing), you'd have to empty that bin twice a day to keep up. And that's a bin in a minor country layby that probably doesn't normally need emptying more than once or twice a week. I doubt very much that the council has the spare staff to massively increase their bin-emptying rounds practically overnight to keep up with that kind of unpredictable increase. I have to wonder whether that rubbish would have been put in any bin in any case. Did everyone leaving rubbish really notice that the layby bin was overflowing on the way in and think "Well, I
would have taken my rubbish to the bin but since it's full, I have no option but to just chuck this into the reservoir/shove it into the bushes"? It seems unlikely somehow.
Yes, more bins emptied more often would eradicate the issue of overflowing bins and would probably help a little bit with other rubbish, where people have dropped it after getting fed up with carrying it after trying to find a bin to put it in. But most of what I've seen of the problem has been of people just leaving the litter where they sat and not even attempting to carry it anywhere to find a bin.
In the woods in the other direction from where I live, since the cafe has now opened for takeaway, there are empty coffee cups and various wrappers being left all over the place, even though there are plenty of bins near the cafe and car park which are emptied pretty frequently (at least they are normally and I've not noticed them being overflowing when I've run past them recently). The simplest conclusion is that people just can't be bothered to carry an empty coffee cup with them on their walk. I sympathise - it's annoying to carry, and if you crumple it up and shove it in your pocket, you end up with dregs leaking onto your clothes. And it takes long enough to drink a coffee that by the time you've finished, you're too far into the woods to just nip back to a bin. But I still
really don't understand the mentality of someone who thinks it's ok to just leave it on the ground for the litter fairies to sort out. And again, I'm not sure adding more bins around all the paths would be viable - even if you just put them on the most well-trodden paths, someone is still going to have to walk round all of those routes, each of which would take several tens of minutes even without stopping to empty bins, carrying full bin bags. So probably several hours a day of someone's time to empty them once a day. But that costs significant money and where's the money going to come from?
I'm really not sure what the solution is, other than punishment (but then they need to be caught and that costs money and who pays for that?
I can't see the police having the resources to stake out all the local beauty spots, even if they were willing), education (but how to reach the right people, and what would convince them to change their behaviour?), or closing all the beauty spots because a few people can't be trusted to behave responsibly.
Our local reservoir has addressed the problem by putting together a rota of volunteers to pick up the litter every day. But I don't think that's viable long term, or fair to expect it of people.