The problem could be fixed adopting two strategic objectives,
1/ Pride in your local community and
2/ Respect for the environments of others
These would be underpinned by three workstreams, Educate, Encourage and Enforce.
Strategic Objectives
1/ Pride in your local community seeks to retain the enthusiasm displayed by many members of the public in volunteering to support local or national initiatives.
Lockdown 1 saw some ¾ of a million people volunteer to support the national effort launched by the NHS time aimed at supporting vulnerable individuals in the community.
Lockdown 3 saw the national vaccination programme supported by volunteers to enable the priority groups to be vaccinated. These initiatives were complemented by many more local initiatives that also offered support by members of the public.
All demonstrate that the UK has a pool of voluntary resource that will support the wider community. While the resource that volunteered during the CV pandemic was focussed on helping individual members of the community, it is anticipated that the public would engage with many other worthy causes if encouraged and led appropriately.
Underlying these cases of organised voluntary activities are the actions of many individuals who individually and selflessly act for the benefit of their community. Examples include checking on vulnerable neighbours and litter picking.
These activities demonstrate that members of the public feel attached to an area and community and deserve encouragement and recognition.
2/ Respect for the environments of others seeks to encourage those visiting an area or even simply travelling through to appreciate that that area is home to something or someone.
The number of car journeys fell significantly during lockdown 1 and the amount of littering along roads was noticeably down. Sadly, as lockdown restrictions were lifted the amount of littering and fly tipping incidents increased.
This part of the initiative seeks to remind people that the land on which their litter / fly tipped material lands will be owned by someone and is likely to be home to wildlife. As such their actions will have an impact on others and to encourage and possibly even reward them for behaving more responsibly.
The workstreams to achieve these objectives are:
Educate / Encourage / Enforce
Educate would take many aspects to cover as many strands of the population as possible. This may be using conventional advertising mediums, for example posters / advertisements / social media presented by well-regarded public figures. It should also be designed to cover all ages and be regularly repeated.
In conjunction with this theme road traffic speed limits would be reduced by 10mph on single lane roads and a speed limit of 20mph introduced in all residential areas.
Encourage seeks to provide some form of reward for all those who engage in the initiative.
This can be either directly, for example by providing resources that can be used in the local community such as a bench or indirectly, for example ‘thank you’ messages on boards when leaving an area.
The overall intention is to make people feel that pride and respect are worthwhile and everyday examples such as sweeping snow from pavements and picking litter is ‘normal’ rather than contributors are the ‘odd one out’. To paraphrase Jason Alexander in a BBC local news article the intention here is to encourage a community that stops dropping litter.
Inevitably the Educate and Encourage themes will not always be successful which will mean that an Enforce theme is needed.
This theme seeks to address the some 1m incidents of fly tipping reported to local councils in 2020 costing £70m to clear. It would also build on existing local initiatives such as one being trialled by Maidstone Borough Council using CCTV to identify the vehicles from which litter is dropped.
Enforce would require the producers of items that generate litter such as soft drink and alcohol manufacturers and fast-food retailers to contribute to a levy that will cover the costs of street cleaning. Similarly, and noting the typical make up of the material deposited as fly tipping, the building materials trade and tyre manufacturers be required to contribute to this levy to enable material to be handled at an appropriate site, such as a council tip, free of charge. In this way the costs of littering / fly tipping are indirectly passed back to the consumer.
The producers would be encouraged to develop their own solutions to preventing the problem for example including the vehicle registration number on fast food packaging and the receipt. It will also encourage those industries to be more focussed on recycling their waste as this will reduce the costs of their raw materials while the wider community will benefit from not having the waste of others blighting their areas.
Conclusion
The strategic goals will need time before they are adopted within society. However, in the same way that attitudes towards smoking and seat belt wearing have changed over time, given sufficient encouragement the Pride and Respect themes can become embedded and will be for the benefit of everyone.
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