Litterbugs are trashing our area and it’s not just a small minority
I’D like to start this week’s column with a statistic that should fill us with pride and horror in equal measure.
This year, volunteers determined to keep our borough clean will have picked up enough litter to fill 3,000 rubbish bags.
3,000! That’s an awful lot of fizzy drinks cans, fast food wrappers and worse.
But it’s also a heck of a lot of time put in by the volunteers you often see out and about in hi-viz jackets giving up their spare hours to help keep our borough tidy.
So that’s why I say we should be both proud and horrified.
In truth, the volunteers from Civic Pride Rossendale should take pride in their efforts. The rest of us – whether horrified or not by the scale of rubbish discarded around the borough – need to ask ourselves why some still consider it socially acceptable to drop litter.
At school, I had it drummed into me that you didn’t drop litter.
Punishments followed for any child caught dropping crisp packets in the playground.
We did litter picks around our school, and regularly watched educational videos about always looking for a bin.
On the rare occasion I go to an airport or visit a big city, I often get frustrated by the lack of bins – often removed for security reasons.
No such excuse exists here in Rossendale, and surely the point is that if you can’t see a bin, it goes in your pocket until you find one?
The maths shared with me by Civic Pride is mind-boggling. Each bin bag will weigh around 6kg.
That’s around 18 tons of litter picked up this year, stuffed full of paper, crisp packets, take away containers, bottles, cans, wipes, cigarette ends and, apparently, more than a few pairs of knickers.
Each bag has around 500 to 600 items in it. So over the course of this year, Civic Pride Rossendale will have collected 1.5million pieces of litter off the streets, laybys, grass verges and other public spaces of Rossendale.
Civic Pride pick litter along the A682 from the fire station to the A56 every 10 days. Each time, they collect 3.5 bags of rubbish. That equates to 200 pieces of rubbish being thrown from cars, lorries and other vehicles every day.
One note left on a Civic Pride volunteer’s car read: “We live with people who do not value the area and litter it. You redress the balance… you make my heart smile.” I feel similarly. But the sheer volume of litter also makes me question my belief that littering is confined to a small minority who simply don’t care.
For anyone who sees someone dropping litter and is offended by it, the obvious thing would be to challenge the person to pick it up.
But I often shy away from doing this – indeed, I did on the town square in Rawtenstall at the weekend – in case the person reacts badly, causes a scene or gets violent. We’ve all read the news stories where that has happened.
The scale of the litter collected makes me wonder whether it is just the unpleasant who drop litter, or whether for some reason it’s becoming more socially acceptable.
Maybe those who throw it just assume someone else will pick it up.
Which they do, of course.
And we owe a debt of gratitude to those who do, because until the selfish who throw their rubbish around learn the error of their ways, the Valley would be a much dirtier place without the hard work of the Civic Pride volunteers.
The Scribbler’s views do not necessarily represent those of the Free Press. Let us know your views by emailing freepressnews@ menmedia.co.uk.