Are you littering without noticing?
For a long time, it has become a common practice (and acceptance) to finish your cigarette and to drop the remains out of the car windows.
Cigarette butts or filters are the most littered item on the planet. An estimated 5.6 trillion cigarettes are smoked each year, out of which two-thirds are improperly disposed of. That’s [4.5 trillion butts] each year. Since the 1980s, cigarette butts have accounted for 30% to 40% of all litter found in coastal and urban litter clean-ups.
Around 122 tons of cigarette butts and cigarette-related litter are dropped every day across the UK.
The Facts About Litter
Cleaning up litter from the streets of Britain costs taxpayers around £500 million. That does not include the amount it costs to clean up parks and other public spaces.
Almost 48% of people admit to dropping litter.
The amount of litter dropped each year in the UK has increased by a massive 500% since the 1960s.
7 out of every 10 items of discarded litter are food packaging or wrappers.
1.3m pieces of rubbish are dropped on UK roads every weekend. 1/3 of motorists admit to littering while they are driving.
The rat population has increased to 60 million due to the increasing amounts of litter.
What Could We Do?
At the moment in the Uk, we are not aware of a platform to report litterbugs other than shaming them on social media or to the local council to report a wide range of issues, including:
Fly-tipping
Flyposting
Graffiti
Dumped trolleys and so on.
In Australia, they have invested in a scheme which allows you to report a ‘Butthead’ or a ‘Tosser’ making it a user-friendly and easy reporting process (if you remember the details), and the ‘Tosser’ being reported can be given an Infringement Notice and taken to court which could help to bring awareness and accountability to the issue.
Australian Littering Scheme