Litter

In many ways we’re a nation of litterbugs! There may be rubbish bins on the street and recycling signs everywhere, but if you look down you’ll notice a tide of newspaper, bottles and fast food debris lurking somewhere very close to your feet. It’s an eyesore, and one that’s about more than dirty streets. For starters, litter is contagious: seeing a street or your favourite park strewn with crisp packets, cans and bottles can make other people think it’s OK to dump their waste too. Which means it’s all too easy for an area to become heavily littered really quickly with the thinking being, “what’s the point of being clean and tidy when no one else cares?”

What’s the big deal with litter?

Unfortunately the consequences of littering are huge. While it may not feel like a big deal to throw away an empty can or bottle, or leave an empty pizza box on the ground, if just ten people do it every day then that’s a LOT of litter by the end of a week. Litter which not only looks unsightly, but is also a danger to others and helps turn where you live into a shabby and neglected area that people want to avoid.

Studies show that confidence is lowered in heavily littered areas, with one government report finding fear of crime goes up when our streets are cluttered by rubbish. Wildlife suffers too with a staggering 69,000 animals a year being maimed or killed by our rubbish. That’s animals and pets being cut by sharp objects like cans or broken glass, strangled by plastic can holders, and choked or poisoned on plastic waste or cigarette butts that animals have eaten.

Fast food is the fastest growing litter problem

Fast food and its packaging is the fastest growing and most problematic area of litter. Ditched packaging has grown by 12%, with snack wrappers rising by 11% and ditched food such as pieces of pizza, half-eaten burgers and chips increasing by 7%. Although food is biodegradable (i.e. it eventually rots away back into the ground), our half-eaten kebabs, burgers and chips often don’t get a chance to decompose because they are eaten by pests such as rats, which thanks to our leftovers are thriving at an alarming rate (the rat population alone is up 25% in just two years). That makes fast food litter bad for our health and our environment.

Can the litter

The answer is of course simple: we need to treat the world outside our front door like the world behind it – meaning being aware that throwing litter on the floor/pavement/by the roadside has an environmental and social impact, and if we wouldn’t treat our homes this way, we shouldn’t ruin our favourite and important places this way either.

The good news is that it doesn’t take much to transform a heavily littered area, so if you have an important place that’s being ruined by other people’s litter and rubbish, enter the Scotland In Focus competition to get a grant to help restore the area to its former beauty.