Proven Solutions to Prevent Roadside Litter
National Highways are responsible for clearing over 4000 miles of motorways and trunk roads in England, you can report litter at the website.
The campaign charity CleanupUK (which organises volunteer clean-ups which obviously can’t be done at the roadside of busy motorways) has a pending litter-picking code for highways.
It wants councils to pick up litter before mowing grass verges, as otherwise all the litter and glass just gets smashed and goes into the air. Note that London roads are managed by Transport for London.
Keep Britain Tidy offers councils and other organisations large signs, to alert people to the dangers of dropping roadside litter.
Littering on highways (including dropping litter out of car windows) is a criminal offence, with fines of up to £500. And collecting litter costs around £40 per bag, which totals millions that could be spent on road maintenance (like mending potholes).
Dropping litter also harms wildlife, as they come onto the roads to eat it, then if they get killed, more wildlife scavenge and they can get killed too. A fifth of UK badgers are killed on our roads each year.
Ways you can reduce roadside litter
If you smoke, get a personal ashtray to immediately extinguish cigarettes until you find a bin (rather than throwing them out the car window, where they fall down storm drains and go into the sea).
Carry a car trash bag in your car, to safely deposit empty bags of crisps and other litter, until you get home.
One farmer had a great idea. He wants fast food restaurants to put vehicle registration numbers on receipts. So if people throw fast food packaging out their car window, they receive a fine in the post, just like for speeding.
Proven ways to reduce roadside litter
Neat Streets Tidy Roadside campaign has invested in scientific mapping, to look at roadside user behaviour, and how to stop roadside litter. It found that every 3 seconds, someone in major cities drops rubbish out their car window.
This was normally at slow-speed locations (like junctions and traffic lights), and mostly from young men (to keep their cars clean) dropping food and drink packaging, paper napkins and cigarette butts. Another reason for litter was due to overflowing bins, and another simply to litter accidentally blowing out from car doors in windy weather.
So this solutions-based organisation went to work to try to find solutions. It trialled car-friendly bins with larger openings for drivers at service stations and retail parks (with colourful bold information on why to use them to protect wildlife). And the slogan ‘keep it ’til you bin it’.
It also installed road signs and billboard ads, and ran social media and radio ads locally. In both cities (Glasgow and Cardiff) these actions massively reduce road litter.
It did say that without the big colourful bins, the signs alone were not enough, showing how councils have to get their act together, to install big colourful bins for people to use. You and your council can download free campaign resources.
