Scottish Rubbish

Special Report By DANIEL BACH
The Sunday Herald

THERE’S something wrong with the Scottish attitude to litter - that’s the consensus of everyone charged with keeping our towns, cities and villages clean.

From council chiefs and binmen to environmental lobby groups and waste mangement teams the facts speak for themselves: many of us think nothing of chucking chip-wrappers and newspapers in the street, dumping our cigarette butts in the gutter or spitting chewing gum all over the pavement.

What should be a social disgrace and an embarrassing eye-sore has simply become part and parcel of the Scottish way of life. So it’s little wonder that those environmental campaigners and city leaders are now saying that the only way to stop litter louts is to treat them the same as drunk-drivers and speeding motorists.

Draconian penalties and an uncompromising mix of education and shame tactics should be used, they say, to deal with the litter that continues to plague Scotland’s streets. The average Scot has to change their attitude to rubbish in the street, they say, and society has to make it socially unacceptable for litterbugs to toss trash.

In the past two years, waste from take-away containers has shot up by 12 per cent, sweet wrappers by 11 per cent, and discarded food like chips and bits of pizza tossed to the curb is up by 8 per cent, according to Scotland in Focus, an environmental charity. Perhaps even worse that messing up our own cities, the nation’s unsightly litter-strewn streets are beginning to tarnish Scotland’s image abroad.

In the Year of Homecoming, with an influx of summer visitors and a wide array of festivals, there are serious concerns that the failure to tackle dirty streets will hit tourism, as travellers decide to spend their hard earned cash elsewhere. But Scotland’s failure to control it’s litter problem is not only an embarrassment - at home and abroad - it’s a very real health hazard.

Thanks to our failure to clean up our streets, the country’s rat population has boomed by 25 per cent in just two years. The cities of Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Glasgow - which are home to more than half of the nation’s population - continually rank below the national average for cleanliness, as judged by the Local Environment Audit developed by the government-backed charity, Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB).

In 2001-02, KSB scored Glasgow an embarrassing 47 out of 100. Although by 2007/08, initiatives such as the council-run Clean Glasgow campaign helped bring the score to 69 - still below the national average of 73. Aberdeen and Edinburgh came in at 72, while Dundee scored 69. Scotland isn’t alone, however.

As beautiful Britain campaigners point out, the UK as a whole lags far behind our continental cousins when it comes to keeping up appearances. Representatives from all four councils also admit that Scots culture is taking far too long to alter its casual attitude towards litter. According to the Scottish government, local authorities are picking up an annual tab of over £100 million to clean-up after litter louts.

The Chartered Institution of Waste Management (CIWM) was a leading force in organizing a ‘Litter Summit’ in Edinburgh, where the Scottish Government joined environmental organizations, businesses and local authorities to piece together a solution for Scotland’s mounting problem with rubbish.

The councils of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow all agreed with suggestions from CIWM, which said public education campaigns, paired with improved council clean up services and stricter penalties, would prove the best formula for helping Scotland clean up it’s act.

While CIWM believes education and marketing schemes are "vital aspects" of any solution, the organisation also says a "zero tolerance approach" - where penalties would be similar to those handed out to people caught drink driving - is the best way to engineer a drastic change in attitudes towards littering. That means toughening up our existing laws, and enforcing them more rigorously.

The powers currentluy exist to send a person to court for littering and fining them up to £25000. However, the government says more needs to be done. A spokesman for Rural Affairs and the environment said:"A sense of responsibility must be instilled in those who carelessly dispose of their waste."

Robert Aldridge who takes the lead on the environment with Edinburgh council says people need to be encouraged to "take greater pride in our beautiful city", they have to be reminded of their "collective responsibility to dispose of litter responsibly".

Aldridge adds: "Making sure people don’t drop litter in the first place is crucial to making our Edinburgh as clean as possible." Dundee City Council views littering as a crime, albeit a low-level one. The council believes ongoing awareness initiatives in schools are slowly but surely starting to change Scots’ attitudes towards tossing litter.

"Undoubtedly many peoples’ attitude towards littering needs to change," said a Dundee Council spokesperson, "and this will only be achieved through a combination of education and enforcement measures."

Aberdeen City Council underlined its concern about the impact litter is having on the city’s environment and reputation. "Public spaces are for everyone to enjoy and everyone has a responsibility to clean up after themselves," a council official said. "Littering and fly-tipping have a very negative impact on Aberdeen, both environmentally and aesthetically. Leaving rubbish lying about also has a detrimental affect on other people’s enjoyment of these areas."

Steven Purcell, leader of Glasgow City Council, is perhaps the most blunt of all local authority leaders when it comes to his assessment of the problem: "No authority can keep a city clean on its own. What’s needed is for the people who live and work in this city to decide to stop dropping litter, to encourage their children not to drop litter and to start reporting it. "We are talking about major behavioral change. We know it won’t happen overnight. However, all the evidence points towards an improvement."

A spokesman for Glasgow’s waste management department added: "We can spend and spend and spend, but the bottom line is attitudes have to change."

A Keep Scotland Beautiful survey found that 38 per cent of the 1001 people polled believed it was every citizens responsibility to keep clean streets, however, 37 per cent believed the burden lay squarely with the local council not the public.

More worryingly, the KSB survey showed a mere 52 per cent believed flyers and newspapers to be litter, while only 28 per cent said discarded cigarette butts - which have skyrocketed since the smoking ban - bothered them. A larger 69 per cent were bothered by dog fouling and 49 per cent by chewing gum.

Many in Scotland are quick to point the finger at young people when it comes to littering. The KSB survey showed 45 per cent of respondents believed litter bugs were teenagers and 42 per cent thought they were school-aged children. But according to the head of one of Scotland’s leading anti-litter charities, young people aren’t the only culprits.

"To single out young people would be plain wrong," said Joyce Faulkner, chair of the Scottish environmental charity The GreenFerry Trust, based in South Queensferry, West Lothian. "I’ve picked up litter for years in our community and some of the problems I see are not created by the young: dumping of newspaper inserts, sandwich packets and debris from builders is not litter left behind by young people. A survey in our community showed young people hated litter as much as adults."

Faulkner says she has some sympathy with the overwhelming task facing councils: "One council worker recently described to me how frustrating it was not to be able to complete a clean-up task before he was pulled away on ‘rapid response’ to deal with another area.

Another described how they had given up cleaning the streets near schools during lunchtimes as the workers regularly had missiles thrown at them. "Of course, there is more that councils could do, but money and advertising campaigns are only one part of this. We must do all we can to educate our community to take a pride in their local area."

And as the influx of summer tourists descend on city parks and high streets across the country, Visit Scotland says Scots need to see the same beauty in their own country which people flock from around the world to enjoy. "Tourism is everyone’s business," said a spokesperson. "If we want to benefit from visitors to our regions it’s important to give them compelling reasons to return. We sell Scotland to the world, bringing millions of visitors and billions of pounds to this country. Everyone has a responsibility to make visitors feel welcome and this includes helping to keep our cities litter free."

David Fleming, a retired auto-worker from Hamilton, speaks for many exasperated Scots at the state of our cities. Sitting outside the City Chambers in George Square, Fleming is trying to enjoy a day trip to Glasgow, but the cigarette butts and food wrappers are more than a little distracting. "The problem is people don’t stop to admire what’s around them in places like Glasgow," the 62-year-old says. "They have no idea of the history and beauty that’s right in front of them."

Fleming, who is quick to pick up the cap from his water bottle that he accidentally dropped beneath the bench, says the councils of Scotland need to up their game and press on with trying to clean up the nation. He’s sure Scottish attitudes towards littering will only change through young people influencing their family and friends - just as children up and down the land have shamed parents into stopping smoking.

"The awareness needs to start in the schools, with the youngest pupils," he says. "Children need to understand that rubbish goes straight in the bin."