So, you’re driving along a country road eating an apple. It doesn’t have to be
an apple; an orange or a banana will do. Anyway, you’re zipping along in the
English countryside and suddenly you realise that you’ve finished your apple
and you’re holding a sticky core in your hand. You could try jamming the
core into the ashtray, but you don’t like the thought of discovering it
there six months later, rotten and impossible to remove. Then you remember
that this is the countryside and that the countryside is one big compost
heap. You can just chuck the core out of the car window. In fact, by
chucking the apple core out of the car window, you assume you’d be doing the
countryside a favour: perhaps before biodegrading into compost your remnants
will be snaffled up by a grateful squirrel, or something. You roll down your
window and fling out your remnants – a little bit proud, even, of your own
little contribution to nature’s own recycling process.
Now, some people would call that littering. The very act of “throwing” is
littering, they’d say, whether it’s an empty crisp packet or a banana peel.
You wouldn’t chuck a banana peel on to somebody’s lawn. So why into a field,
where it takes four days, on average, to be eaten, or up to two years to
become soil? Before it disappears, the banana peel just sits there like half
a pair of Marigold washing-up gloves. It might as well be half a pair of
Marigolds, for all any other passing motorist can tell. The peel is a
blight. It is unwanted by you. Therefore, it is litter.
Many people in high places have become litter-obsessed. There is Jeremy
Paxman, who thinks Britain has become “a filthy island in which there is now
an occasional oasis of cleanliness”. There is the entire Tory party. There
are all sorts of pop stars and footballers who remind young people to keep
Britain tidy on CBBC. Most prominently, there is Bill Bryson, the new
president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), an American
sub-editor turned bestselling travel writer. You might have heard him
reincarnated on the radio recently as a litter monitor. All his life he’s
bitched and moaned about litter but, unlike Paxo, he’s going to do something
about it. He thinks he can solve our litter problem. He wants to “change the
country’s mentality”. He says (naively?): “I don’t think that’s hard to do.”
Litter is a complicated subject, Bryson has found out. And extremely divisive.
It even resists statutory definition. Instead, Encams, the environmental
charity that runs the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, defines it thus: “[It is]
commonly assumed to include materials often associated with smoking, eating
and drinking, improperly discarded.” And while most of us know that the
half-empty KFC carton dumped by the side of the motor-way is “improperly
discarded”, how about the empty coffee cup left on the bench in a bus
shelter? Most of us have done it. But, litterwise, is the coffee cup less
bad than the chicken container?
And does it become worse if the coffee cup gets blown over on to the pavement
by the wind? And, if it does get blown over, whose fault is it? Yours, for
having left it there? The wind’s? The council’s? A lot of coffee drinkers
out there would argue that if there had been enough bins in the first place,
it would never have happened.
There’s only so long a person can be expected to walk around with an empty cup
in their hand. And where were the rubbish collectors? It’s the rubbish
collector’s fault.
Bryson’s big thing is fines. As I sit in the back of a car with him on a way
to one of his literary talks in Hertfordshire, he draws the seatbelt
analogy: “When the law first came in there was huge resistance; a couple of
years later everyone automatically buckles up. Nothing to do with social
class or attitudes to life. In terms of dropping litter, it’s the same
position: get to the point where you automatically don’t do it.”
Is littering getting worse? Even this is a hotly contested point. Recent
figures from the Marine Conservation Society indicate a 90 per cent increase
in beach litter since 1994. Meanwhile, Encams argues that we are
experiencing a “five-year litter low”: think back to what it was like when
nobody cleaned up after their dogs. Bryson disagrees, and points out that
Encams is government-funded. He rolls out his own statistics: “There have
been one million reported incidences of fly-tipping in Liverpool and 170,000
in Sheffield and only one prosecution. For some reason it’s become
acceptable. People now eat on the move in a way they never did ten or 15
years ago. They’re driving along and they’re finished with the food and they
don’t want the carton with them any more and so they throw it out. And the
message that they’re getting is that it’s OK to do that because it’s
happening everywhere.”
Bryson is squeezing in his antilittering campaign between books: he’s finished
his concise Shakespeare biography but is still contractually obliged to
write two more travelogues. He inadvertently became the president of the
CPRE after he asked his readers to e-mail him if they were concerned about
litter. He received almost 1,000 responses, called the CPRE to find out what
it was going to do about it and was offered the top job. He has five years
to make an impact.
Bryson has been said to resemble a woodland animal, but now you have to
imagine him as a hard-line traffic warden armed with mechanical grippers. He
comes out with very unBryson-like statements, such as: “One of the most
effective ways of dealing with it is by punishing people.” Or: “You’ve got
to start arresting people and making examples.” Or: “If the councils don’t
respond there are all sorts of laws that can be resorted to – you can get an
abatement order for £3.50.”
“There is a growing problem in the countryside, where an awful lot of litter
is accumulating and proliferating,” he says. “It has to be addressed before
it gets out of control.” He corrects himself by adding: “In certain places
it already is out of control. There is a stretch of the A11 in Norfolk –
near Thetford – that I drive by and it is always a complete tip. Litter is
dropped there and doesn’t get picked up from year to year!”
For a while the drive out to Hoddesdon is disappointingly clean. Central
London, too, is spotless, and we catch sight of only one stray black bin
bag, lurking on Albany Street. The A10 is more promising: empty plastic Coke
bottles, pens, lighters, children’s toys and crisp packets lie scattered by
the side of the road; when the wind’s up, torn-up bits of blue plastic
sheeting and chocolate wrappers are whipped into the air. Finally, just
before the Broxbourne turn-off, we find a lay-by where someone has dumped a
video player, some ancient sound-recording equipment and an empty carton of
banana-maracuja juice.
There is a bin here, empty, and strewn around it are dozens of empty cans of
super-strength lager. Bryson is incredulous. “I mean, who does
this?” he asks holding up, squeamishly, a can between forefinger and thumb.
But he is happy at least about the warning sign to fly-tippers that the
Borough of Broxbourne has nailed into the ground. From the point of view of
the CPRE, the sign is a problem in itself, as its size makes it a blight on
the countryside. But, Bryson decides, it’s a step in the right direction.
Bryson’s punitive approach is a new front on the war on litter.
In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher famously looked out of her window on her way
to RAF Northolt and was appalled at the mess. She set an example and went on
a litter pick. Then came the “Clean Nineties”. Don’t worry if the decade
seems to have passed you by; it never materialised. The government’s
antilitter campaign aimed to “make Britain the cleanest place in Europe”. It
didn’t happen. While cities such as Frankfurt and Brussels have
street-cleaning budgets of €100 million (£67 million), Manchester spends £8
million. Amsterdam’s environmental enforcement officers issue around 7,000
penalties a year; in all of England there are about 500 convictions
annually, and each time there is an outcry in the Daily Mail– most
recently about a woman in Sussex who was charged £80 when her toddler
grandson dropped two Quavers. With Bryson in charge, there is going to be
more of an outcry. He imagines a future of litter committees, direct action
and greater law enforcement: “A lot of people don’t realise that littering
is illegal,” he says. “Councils need to start seeing it as a priority.” Does
he advocate naming and shaming? “That would be part of it.” If you want to
see the future, go to Gloucestershire City Council’s homepage, where you’ ll
find a series of pictures of scowling teenage boys. Caught on CCTV, they are
“suspected litter louts”.
Why is it in Britain that we always seem to go over the top in the end? Why
this war on litter? Why these enormous fines and “zero-tolerance” zones?
Why, in Glasgow, for example, did a crack team of litter wardens – “trained
by police in how to resolve conflict if they are attacked” – hit the streets
in stab-proof vests? Why does Encams treat litterers as if they are
dangerous criminals on the run? “Encams does not advocate putting personal
safety at risk,” a spokesman told me.
Bryson doubts that “most people that litter are psychopaths”. In fact, there
is evidence to suggest that although 50 per cent of us say that we would
never dream of littering, 90 per cent of us do it. (What kind of litterer
are you? Ergonomists have identified five types: guilty, blaming,
self-justifying, callous or oblivious). What’s changed, he thinks, is that
people seem to litter “without any self-consciousness or slyness. Sometimes
it’s totally irrational and inexplicable.” He is still visibly appalled by
the memory of a stack of Bernard Matthews delivery papers he once found
discarded on a country lane. “I gathered some of them up and sent them back
to Bernard Matthews, and I said to the company, ‘You ought to be training
your drivers to love their country and to be a little more responsible’.”
What happened next? “I never heard another murmur.”
Part of the root of Britain’s problem can be traced back to around 2000, when
it was decreed that it wasn’t enough to clean up after everybody else;
litter was a question of personal responsibility – only no one wanted to be
responsible. Food containers proliferated, and everything, even clothes,
became disposable. Apart from street-cleaners and the occasional senior
citizen, today only ramblers still pick up after others.
“Because of the scale of the problem, there will have to be lots of people
picking things up voluntarily,” says Bryson. He wants to see litter
committees set up in every village. But we will not see the bestselling
author being lowered into a tank of 40 rats, as a councillor from Colchester
was, in a “fun” attempt to stop Britain being trashed. Bryson reverts to Robocopmode:
“You have to make it clear to people that they have committed an offence and
will be punished for it.”
Will his take-no-prisoners approach work? Francis McAndrew, the
American environmental psychologist deemed to be the expert on such matters,
told me that he was sceptical about awareness programmes. But he is also
half-hearted about fines: “Punitive measures work only if the chances of
being caught and punished are very high. Making litter disposal as
convenient and inexpensive as possible would be the best step, and rewarding
people for proper litter disposal would be even better.”
McAndrew talks enthusiastically about schemes in which random individuals who
make use of recycling programmes are rewarded with £25. Some campgrounds and
amusement parks in the US have instigated successful programmes in which
bags of litter can be exchanged for free tickets for rides, or a lottery
ticket.
Bryson admits that he is still largely feeling his way in his new job and is
open to suggestions. “I’m not doing this because I’m American and think I
can tell you how to run your country,” he says. “I’m doing this because I’m
a long-term resident and I’ve seen all this happening over a very long time.
I would rather not be doing this at all; I’d much rather be at home
gardening.”
Instead he will meet the Secretary of State for the Environment, David
Miliband. Then it’s David Cameron’s turn, a sign, at least, that the people
at the top are listening. In the meantime, the question at the back of
everybody else’s mind is this: surely one discarded apple core can’t make
that much of a difference? In one’s head it is possible to make all sorts of
exceptions.
A short history of littering
1353: “Rakers” are employed in London to remove rubbish once a week.
1408: Henry IV’s removal order instructs that refuse be removed or else
forfeits paid.
17th century: London is filthy, but most waste is organic. The Mayor of
London introduces a 20 shilling fine for failing to keep “ashes, dust,
filth, ordure or other noisome thing whatsoever until the raker do come to
carry away the same”.
18th century: The Industrial Revolution begins, leading to increased
production and waste. Some live by selling other people’s rubbish, including
dog dung, used by tanners for purifying leather.
19th century: The 1848 Public Health Act sparks systematic waste
regulation. The Victorians associate cleanliness with virtue.
1927: The term litter lout appears in print for the first time.
1930s: The manufacture of plastics begins.
1970s/1980s: The first bottle banks appear. Environmental protection
included in the 1986 Treaty of Rome. Morecambe and Wise, then Abba, are
signed up for a Keep Britain Tidy poster campaign.
2007: A survey carried out by Encams reveals that 50 per cent of people
admit to dropping litter. Half of them justifiy their behaviour by saying
that “everyone else is doing it”. The most common items are cigarette ends
and packets, sweet wrappers, drinks containers and fast-food packaging.
Sources: Times Archives; Encams; wasteonline.org.uk
