A lesson on litter that Britain has failed to learn
SIR – Studies show that, where litter already exists, people find it more acceptable to drop it.
Britain has not heeded this. In January 2009, you printed a letter from me saying that the Highways Agency had advised me that roads in Kent were cleared of litter to the Department for the Environment’s “B standard”. Even then, B standard was not enough, and littering is now worse than ever.
I agree with Judith Carter (Letters, March 7) that open-top vehicles should be forced to cover their detritus to stop it blowing about. Last weekend, on the A249 in Kent, a long piece of bubble wrap tangled around our car wheel. Litter is not just an eyesore; it can be dangerous. Linda Scannell
Boughton Monchelsea, Kent
SIR – Like most main roads, the A41 between the M1 and Tring is strewn with rubbish. The overgrown verges are being cut back and cleared by heavy machinery, so the inside lane is coned off. Yet the litter remains, plus that from previous years, now revealed. Could it not be cleared away in one go?
The council says it costs more than £20,000 to cone off the lane; now this has been done, could not those sentenced to community service be drafted in to clear away this rubbish? Stephen Lally Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire
SIR – The Government doesn’t need to pass a law requiring open-top lorries to tie waste down (Letters, March 7) as there already is one.
Regulation 100(2) of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use)
Regulations 1986 says: “The load carried by a motor vehicle or trailer shall at all times be so secured, if necessary by physical restraint other than its own weight, and be in such a position, that neither danger nor nuisance is likely to be caused to any person or property by reason of the load or any part thereof falling or being blown from the vehicle.”
All we need is for it to be enforced. Richard Light
Hitchin, Hertfordshire
SIR – When I was a child, we collected the cigarette packets and matchboxes discarded by adults.
A guard on the train home from Morpeth to Annitsford also collected such ephemera. Coming down from Edinburgh in the afternoons, he would go through the train picking up what he found. Anything he did not want he gave to us. In those days, cigarette packets were works of art. Robert Ward
Loughborough, Leicestershire
SIR – In 1986 Margaret Thatcher appointed Richard Branson as “litter tsar”. Maybe this role should return. Peter Alexander
Fleet, Hampshire
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