20 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT FLY-TIPPING

WE ALL LOVE A WALK IN THE COUNTRYSIDE. BUT NO AMBLE ALONG A BRITISH RIVERSIDE PATH OR WOODLAND TRACK IS COMPLETE WITHOUT COMING ACROSS A PILE OF ILLEGALLY DUMPED HOUSEHOLD WASTE. WHETHER ITS A LOAD OF STAINED MATTRESSES, A HEAP OF RIPPED-OUT KITCHEN UNITS OR HALF A TON OF SMASHED-UP PLASTERBOARD, PICKING OUR WAY AROUND A BIG PILE OF SHITE IS A PART OF ANY WALK IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS.

Despite BEING SOCIALLY, MORALLY AND ENVIRONMENTALLY UNACCEPTABLE, FLY-TIPPING IS JUST AS POPULAR NOW AS ITS EVER BEEN, WITH AN ESTIMATED 1-IN-5 OF US REGULARLY DUMPING VANLOADS OF ILLEGAL WASTE IN AREAS OF NATURAL BEAUTY.

But HOW MUCH DO WE ACTUALLY KNOW ABOUT THIS QUINTESSENTIALLY BRITISH PRACTICE? WHEN DID IT START? WHAT IS THE MOST FLY-TIPPED PRODUCT? WHO IS THE SMALLEST PERSON EVER TO DO IT? IT’S TIME TO ANSWER ALL THOSE QUESTIONS AND 17 MORE. HERE’S…

1 FLY-TIPPING probably came over to Britain with the Romans in around 220 BC. Historians like Mary Beard probably believe that provincial governors imposed taxes on the population, perhaps requiring them to pay a levy to Julius Caesar on any goods they needed to dispose of. Unable or unwilling to pay these possible taxes, canny Britons would more than likely have loaded up their ox-carts with the refuse, conceivably dumping it under cover of darkness at the side of Roman roads.

2 BACK in the Middle Ages, the offence of ‘flye typpinge’ was punishable by death, and by a strange legal quirk this punitive measure has never been taken off the legal statute book. This is, of course, a legal anomaly, and the last execution for the offence took place way back in 1978. These days, offenders escape with their lives, a fine of up to £1000 and 200 hours community service.

3 IF YOU think the practice of fly-tipping is restricted to unlicensed tradesmen and DIYers too cheap to hire a skip, you may be surprised to hear that many Tinseltown A-listers have been prosecuted for illegally dumping their rubbish. In 2007, Clint Eastwood was fined $1500 by Carmel magistrates for dumping half a ton of builder’s rubble in the Hollywood Hills after ripping out his patio to put in some decking. And last year, socialite and IT-girl Paris Hilton was given a $2,000 fine and ordered to attend a social awareness course after being caught by Bel Air police emptying a bath, a toilet, a sink and twenty yards of copper pipe out of her van in a back street off Sunset Boulevard.

4 HOLLYWOOD stars who have never been prosecuted for fly-tipping include Spiderman star Toby McGuire, straight-to-DVD king Wings Hauser, and Tim Roth, who por trayed Reservoir Dogs’s Mr Orange.

5 ONE BIRMINGHAM couple loved fly-tipping so much that they actually took their wedding vows whilst illegally dumping rubbish. Andrew Mould and Olive Mildew gathered with their guests in a secluded layby off the A42 for the unusual marriage ceremony. As the couple took their vows, the best man and three ushers began emptying a vanload of cardboard packaging onto the verge. The vicar even got in on the act by throwing some old prayer cushions into a hedge before pronouncing Andrew and Olive man and wife.

6 THE MOST valuable fly-tippage ever recorded was a pile of Fabergé Eggs dumped in a layby in St. Petersberg in 1912. The haul, worth over £85million, was owned by Tsar Nicholas II, who decided to get rid of them during a clear out of the attic at his Winter Palace. The notoriously thrifty Tsar asked his treasury ministers for 35 Roubles to hire a skip, but took care of the matter himself that night and pocketed the cash.

7 ILLEGALLY dumping your rubbish is cheaper than hiring a skip, but you could be hit with a hefty fine, as council officials often go through fly-tipped refuse looking for material that will point to the perpetrator. “For this reason, make sure you pick through your crap first to take out any addressed envelopes, utility bills and prescriptions etc,” says Money Saving Exper t Mar tin Lewis.

8 POPULAR HBO series Game of Thrones filmed a scene where the character Jon Snow, played by Kit Harrington, was ordered by The Maester to clear out a storeroom at Castle Black and dispose of everything properly. In the sequence, rebellious Snow loaded the contents of the room, including old barrels, broken chairs and mouldy sack cloth, onto a cart and dumped everything in a wood on the other side of The Wall. As one of the most popular characters in the series, Snow was seen as a role model for many of the show’s young fans, and GoT producers worried that his actions would set a bad example. After a meeting of the show’s producers the scene was cut and replaced with some sex.

9 THE SMALLEST man ever to be prosecuted for fly-tipping was Calvin Phillips who, in 1986, was caught by police dumping a Tonka truck full of tiny flat-pack wardrobes that he had ripped out of the dolls’ house where he lived. Despite the pile of illegally dumped waste being smaller than a shoebox, the fine imposed on Phillips by Cardiff magistrates was of normal size – £800, plus 200 hours community service.

10 ONE YORKSHIRE couple loved fly-tipping so much that they held the Christening of their first child whilst illegally dumping some old floorboards and two mattresses in woods near Osset. Janet Soupspoon held her baby and the godparents made their pledges while husband Frank dragged the wooden planks from his transit van and lobbed them into undergrowth. And, after making the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead to welcome him into the family of Christ, the vicar helped Frank drag the heavy mattresses into the bushes.

11 IF YOU are caught fly-tipping in Germany, you may be accused of ‘Fliegenkippen’. On the other hand, you may not. That’s because Fliegenkippen is the literal Google translation of ‘fly-tipping’, whilst for all we know the Germans may in fact have their own colloquial terms for the practice, such as bad dumping (‘schlechtes Dumping’) or dump and run (‘dump und lauf’).

12 SCIENTISTS believe that by the year 2050, the practice of fly-tipping will have changed beyond all recognition. Gone will be the white Transit van pulling into a layby in the middle of the night to offload a couple of settees and a fridge. Instead, silver hover vans will glide silently to a halt before offloading a couple of settees and a fridge behind a crater on the Moon, or perhaps even Mars.

13 TOP OF the list of most popular items fly-tipped by Britons comes old carpets, closely followed by broken chairs, old washing machines and builders’ rubble. Down at the bottom of the list comes jewels, gold bars and bags of cash.

14 A FEW adventurous people like to combine their love of flytipping with another activity closely associated with laybys and secluded spots – dogging. Dog-tippers dump their rubbish before watching a couple engage in sex in the back of a Vauxhall Astra. Or they may indulge in sex in the back of their now empty van, inviting other dog tippers to watch while masturbating in their trousers.

15 PUT DOWN the word FLYTIPPING on a scrabble board and you’ll get a respectable 21 points. And if the F or the Y sit on a double letter score, you can make that 25. If the word spans the triple word square, you’ll bag 63, and using all your letters in doing so will get you a bonus 50 on top, making a game-winning 113 points. However, fly-tipping is actually two separate words, albeit hyphenated, so it’s not allowed.

16 A COUPLE from Newcastle loved fly-tipping so much that, when Stan Cheesehole passed away, rather than bury or cremate him, his wife Edna decided to have him flytipped. Mourners gathered down a dirt track in Plessey Woods to celebrate Stan’s life. And whilst the local vicar read a eulogy, undertakers dragged the coffin out of the van along with a pile of grass cuttings, some roofing felt and 24 square yards of perished carpet underlay, and pushed them all in the bushes.

17 WHEN scientists at Oxford University conducted research into illegal waste dumping throughout the United Kingdom, they found that laybys with a sign saying “No Fly-tipping” were equally likely to contain illegally dumped material as those with no signs. The researchers concluded that the fly-tippers are in some degree illiterate.

18 IF ALL the illegally dumped waste in the UK was gathered together in one big fly-tipped pile, it would need a white transit van the size of Rutland to move it all, and a layby the size of Wales’s Gower Peninsula to dump it in.

19 IN CONTRAST to rubbish that is fly-tipped in the countryside, refuse that is disposed of responsibly is dealt with under the government’s UK Managed Waste Strategy scheme; that is to say, it is taken away by local authorities and dumped in the countryside.

20 BY AN extraordinary coincidence, as well as describing an offence under section 33 (1)(a) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, both “fly” and “tipping” are words connected to restaurant waiters and soup. A “fly” is what you might complain about after finding one floating in it, whilst “tipping” is the awkward process of adding a small gratuity to your bill in the hope that noone wanks in it next time you visit.