I read a news story the other day that made me think about the types of litter that fall from the sky. My immediate thoughts turned to meteorites (perhaps more detritus than litter), odd bits of spacecraft (particularly in Russia where, traditionally, returning cosmonauts have ejected from their spacecraft and parachuted to earth) and, of course, fireworks – see how many spent rockets you encounter on your travels over the next week or so.

This issue also led me, at last, to find out the answer to a question that has lurked in my subconscious for ages – what happens to the contents when you flush the loo on an aeroplane ? Well, I am pleased to say that whatever you flush ends up in a holding tank on the plane and is emptied when the plane lands. What a relief ! And in some contrast to what happens still on many trains in this country – the loo empties its contents onto the track, hence the plea not to flush while the train is stopped at a station. So, spare a thought for the guys working on the railway tracks – not a fragrant job on occasions, you would imagine.

Anyway, what started all this off in my mind ? Well, it was a story from the Shanghai Daily telling of the problems caused by people littering from high-rise apartment blocks. Think about it – you’re way up off the ground and you’re extremely unlikely to get caught littering from such altitude. The temptation to chuck stuff out of the window is huge.

But a certain Mr Yu placed a notice in his apartment block accusing his higher-altitude neighbours of throwing used condoms onto his balcony. Mr Yu went so far as to nail the offending condoms onto the community notice board – yuck ! His comment was priceless : “I have never had such a disgusting ‘windfall’”, he complained.

We may giggle at this, but littering from a high-rise flat is no laughing matter and is, I think, in many ways similar to littering from a vehicle. Being at altitude or being cocooned in a vehicle causes people to alter their moral standards, not least because they are unlikely to get caught. The property management officials in Shanghai had remarked : “We have staff closely monitoring high-rise windows” to which our reaction is probably “yeah, right….”.

But there is a very serious side to this issue. It’s that littering in general is rightly considered to be a selfish, thoughtless, anti-social act. But, most of the time, it doesn’t directly cause physical harm. However, transfer such behaviour to a place at altitude and you create quite a different situation. There have been at least three such instances in the UK in recent times : a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush where, similar to the Shanghai episode, all sorts of rubbish (including “used condoms and other delights”) was being thrown out of the upper storeys and defiled the garden below; a fridge-freezer and, in separate incidents, the headboard of a bed, a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner and a sink were thrown from tower blocks in Glasgow – all luckily avoided hitting anyone; and finally, perhaps seemingly innocuous compared with the previously-mentioned objects, a full black bin-liner was chucked off a high-rise balcony at a tower block in London – it landed on a pram in the garden below and killed the baby in it. What a tragic result of completely thoughtless and entirely unnecessary behaviour.

I read a fascinating blog the other day by a man from Virginia by the name of Bob Updegrove. He recollected a speaker who he had heard some time before speaking out strongly against litter – but with an interestingly different slant.

The nameless speaker used as an example people who eat at McDonalds but who, instead of collecting up all the rubbish left over after their meal and taking it across to the rubbish bin provided, simply leave it there on the table. His point was that, when you do that, you are essentially saying that there is someone else around who is lower than you and who will come along and tidy up your mess.

That speaker had a point, didn’t he ? When people drop litter, they are taking the view that it is beneath them either to take their rubbish home or to put it in a bin. They are making a statement that it’s someone else’s job to pick it up and dispose of it.

But some people come up with pretty convincing counter-arguments to this. Not once have I been told, in all seriousness, how it is important that there is litter thrown around the place as it gives someone employment to pick it up. It doesn’t seem to cross people’s minds that local authorities would gladly redeploy their street cleaning staff on other, much more constructive duties, if there wasn’t the need for so much litter to be cleared up.

What I do question, though, is to what extent it would change people’s behaviour if we started communicating the message that “littering is an act of contempt – if you litter you are saying that there is someone else out there of lowlier status than you who is fit to pick it up”. To a proportion of litterers, the thought that someone else might pick up their litter wouldn’t even cross their mind. But, to many who litter, I do believe that it might stop and make them think. It is the kind of message that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been tried out and which, if formulated in the right way, might succeed in changing the attitude and behaviour of some types of litterer.

I can, for example, see it working in schools. In my local secondary school, the caretaker collect 2-3 black sacks of litter every single school day from the school buildings and grounds. I suspect that the young people at the school would relate to the idea that dropping litter in the school is a statement of arrogance and of contempt for the caretaker – akin to the days of yore when servants abounded and were expected to fulfil the most demeaning of tasks for their superiors that would these days no doubt merit discussion in front of an employment tribunal.

So – let’s give this issue a bit more thought and see if this is an idea that can get the “please put your litter in the bin” message across more effectively to at least some of those who need to change their behaviour. Litter shouldn’t really be “beneath us” at all……

No, I’m not talking about half-eaten carrots and sugar-lumps carelessly discarded around the stables. I’m referring to an incident in Northern Ireland earlier this month in which the tragedy of the death of 4 horses descended into farce and gave full meaning to August’s traditional label in the media of “the silly season”.

The story starts with 4 horses that were running loose on the Newry bypass. Unfortunately, the horses were involved in a collision with a car driven by a local man. Of the 4 horses – poor things – 2 were killed instantly and 2 were “euthanised” by a vet who was subsequently called to the scene (”euthanised” ?? well, that is the word used in the Horse and Hound’s account of the incident; it’s not a word I have come across before and smacks of that insidiously ever-growing practice of dispensing with good old Anglo-Saxon words like “put down” and fabricating words that euphemise [touché !] the true meaning of what is being said).

Anyway, I digress. The point of this horse story is that the rescue services were left with 4 dead horses on the main road. As you might expect, horses being fairly weighty animals whose carcases are not susceptible to being easily rolled out of the way, a specialist removal firm was called in to clear the highway of these noble beasts’ bodies and they did their job for the modest price of £500 and submitted their bill.

So far, in the circumstances, so good. But this is where it turns silly. The Roads Service, to whom the £500 clearance bill was submitted, must have been feeling in particularly parsimonious mood at the time. They clearly felt determined that someone else should foot the bill and so set their legal department’s best minds onto the case. The ingenious solution that they came up with was that – and how could we possibly have come to any conclusion other than this ? – the horse carcases were litter. And, of course, litter on a road of that classification is the responsibility not of the Roads Service but of the local council. So the £500 bill was passed on to Newry and Mourne council who, naturally enough, objected to the request to pay it.

I rather wish that the late and immensely admirable Lord Denning (one of the more famous Masters of the Rolls) had been around to comment on this case – he had the most wonderful knack of making eloquent and eminently comprehensible legal pronouncements with reference to common sense principals that all of us can relate to. In his absence, I can quote only the Sinn Fein Mayor of Newry and Mourne who commented that he found it “fairly distressing” that dead horses should be classified in the same way as burger wrappers. In any case, part of our understanding of the word “litter” is that it is something negligently (and sometimes deliberately) left behind but which the litterer should have deposited somewhere else. The argument used by the Roads Service was that smaller dead animals found on the highway (we nowadays call them “road kill”) are litter, so these horses must also be so classified.

Wherever you believe that the common sense view lies in this case, I feel confident that most of us would simply take the view “just get on with it and sort it out”. Such was the view of a spokesman from the Highways Agency in England who commented : “We certainly wouldn’t classify dead horses as litter. We would arrange for their appropriate removal.”.

So, back to the silly season and a little piece of gentle advice to those in the public eye. When August comes along, the press are going to be a bit short of news because all the politicians are on holiday. So, in August, please try hard not to do or say anything that is at all likely to be swooped upon by a news-deprived press. If you do, it may be blown out of all proportion and you may find that you are under the spotlight for something that, at almost any other time of year, wouldn’t earn so much as a column millimetre.

Someone throwing litter from a vehicle as they speed by is, for some people, the most irritating form of littering that they ever witness. There are various aspects that rankle – the contempt for one’s local environment shown by a driver cocooned in a vehicle; the rapid sequence of events in which a vehicle appears, the window is wound down, the offending article is chucked out, the window is wound up again and the vehicle and driver are gone; the sheer illogicality of discarding something which imposes minimum inconvenience in terms of keeping it in the vehicle and binning it at the destination; the fact that drivers often go to the trouble of knotting up whole plastic bags of rubbish – and then throwing them from their vehicle.

Well, vehicle litterers – we are now starting to fight back. Keep Britain Tidy this month launched a campaign aimed at highlighting this particular form of antisocial behaviour with the intention of mustering sufficient public support to bring about a change in the law.

It may surprise you to learn that it is well-nigh impossible to fine someone who litters from a vehicle. The law in this area does not allow a fine to be imposed simply on the driver of the vehicle as it may not have been the driver who committed the act of littering. Think of speeding offences – the driver is, of course, responsible for a speeding occurrence and the only argument in court is usually who was driving the car at the time. But think also of the law for wearing seat belts. In the case of someone in the car being spotted not wearing a seat belt, the police have the power to fine the driver – fair enough, as the driver should be in control not only of their vehicle but also of the passengers and so can ensure that they are all belted up.

So why can’t the driver be held responsible if someone litters from their vehicle while they are in the driving seat ? Search me.

In fact Keep Britain Tidy are campaigning for a hard-hitting approach to dealing with car litterers, including fining, community service and points on their licence. Their research shows that it is mainly such deterrents as these that will stop this behaviour. And when the Highways Agency reports that over 700,000 sacks of rubbish are removed from England’s roads and roadsides each year, you do feel that a stricter approach is required.

It is interesting that the most commonly-littered item from vehicles is cigarette ends. It is also amazing that many smokers still don’t see cigarette ends as constituting litter. I have heard of one or two successful campaigns on roads badly littered by cigarette butts where signs have been erected saying “This road is not an ashtray”. It seems that such signs have had some effect – I am a keen advocate of using a little humour now and then which does, I suggest, often get through to people more effectively than the constantly hectoring “Don’t litter !”. One of my favourite signs is on the outside of a pub in Devon and it says “When the road and the plant pots are full, please use the ashtray below”.

So there is now something that you can do when you see someone chuck litter from a car. Follow this link (vehicle littering petition) through to the Keep Britain Tidy website and sign yourself up on the petition to change the law. It may seem only a symbolic action, but if Keep Britain Tidy collect enough names, then they can at least go back to the government and show that it’s not just Keep Britain Tidy that is fed up with littered roads and verges. It’s the majority of us.

I should add that in other countries they are often able to go to greater lengths than this. The Don’t Mess with Texas campaign, for instance, allows you to report the number plate of a vehicle litterer who will then receive a letter enclosing a rubbish bag and explaining to the driver why littering from a vehicle is not a smart thing to do. We can’t yet do that in this country, but let’s hope that the time will come when we can.

There was a very heartening story in the news last week. A teenager was spotted via a CCTV camera dropping litter near the war memorial in Hartlepool’s Victory Square. The system cranked into action and police officers confronted the teenager (who was with a group of his friends) and threatened him with a fine.

Now – what would you expect the average teenager to do in such circumstances, I wonder ? Let out a torrent of abuse at the officers and run away ? Perhaps even lash out and inflict physical injury on the policemen ? On the other hand, some teenagers might protest that “it wasn’t me who dropped it” or perhaps even confess and apologise for their act of littering.

Well, what actually happened was none of these. The quick-thinking teenager dashed into a nearby shop and reappeared with a roll of bin bags. He enlisted the help of his mates and they filled 2 bins bags with rubbish from all over the square in a matter of minutes.

The police were, not surprisingly, very impressed by all this : “I think it is excellent that first of all the youth involved recognised what he had done. He seemed to be horrified by his actions. His effort and that of his friends to make amends is very encouraging”, said the Acting Chief Inspector. You do wonder, though, to what extent the youth was “horrified” by the fact that he had littered rather than horrified at the prospect of a £75 fine.

Anyway, I do suggest that the moral of this story is that common sense, with a healthy dash of creativity, can act as a much more effective educator and changer of behaviour than a simple fine. I think that the policemen deserve huge credit for their human approach to this situation. You would think that the young man will remember this episode for years to come and can happily claim bragging rights for how his flash of inspiration saved him from a hefty fine. His bragging in itself will act as a highly effective “word of mouth” reminder to his circle of friends that littering isn’t a civilised habit.

There was a fascinating news item reported last week. It involved two police officers in County Antrim in Northern Ireland. Routinely enough, the officers decided to take a break from their patrolling duties and were stopped in their patrol car having a drink, a snack and, one of them, a smoke.

What happened next is open to some debate. Two passers-by (one of whom was a litter warden) claimed that the officers threw a steaming tea bag and a milk carton out of the patrol car window. One of the officers was also accused of smoking in his patrol car and then throwing the butt out of the window. The officers claimed otherwise – that they certainly didn’t litter their leftovers on the ground.

What, on the face of it, seems so out of proportion is that the case came to court. In court, the District Judge failed to accept their stories – she fined the police officers and awarded the smoker and extra £100 fine for smoking in a smoke-free place i.e. a work vehicle. To add to their misery, the police officers were also ordered to pay £100 in costs after it was stated that the case had been “vigorously contested by both defendants at every turn”.

It strikes me that there are various conclusions that we can take away from this unusual case. First, that enforcement of the anti-littering laws is not, by any stretch of the imagination, easy. For a start, someone has to witness someone else littering and then, if necessary, be able to prove it in court. This is the difficulty that countless local authority enforcement officers have experienced over the last few years – they can fine someone only when they actually see them dropping litter. When you think about it, the chances of that are fairly small and depend very much on how many enforcement officers the local authority has decided to deploy on the streets.

Second, the process of enforcement can seem so disproportionate to the offence. If you think about it, the convictions of the two police officers for a littering offence is bound to have a serious effect on their career prospects – all for dropping the remains of their snacks and cigarette on the ground. And yet, on the other side of the argument, you feel bound to ask : “just what WILL get the message across to people that littering is a seriously antisocial activity ?”. There is widespread feeling that a few high-profile prosecutions do the anti-littering message no harm and that, over time, people will indeed change their behaviour accordingly.

I would add a third point – that if you can’t even rely on the police to abide by a law which supports a very elementary aspect of modern civilised behaviour, then it is an indication that our society is in trouble. Thankfully, I suspect that the two policemen in question are not typical of their kind.

This month has seen the publication of the Marine Conservation Society’s “Beachwatch 2008” report. And depressing reading it makes.

Volunteers surveyed 374 beaches around the UK in September 2008 and logged the types of litter that they found over a sample 100 metre stretch of the beach.

I wonder what we might all imagine to be the most prevalent form of litter that was recorded – stuff washed in from the sea ? Fishing nets, pallets thrown overboard from ships or errant buoys, perhaps ? Not at all – the leading identifiable source of litter was – perhaps you have already guessed – yes, the good old onshore public.

I should point out that identifying the source of beach litter isn’t always that easy and that MCS logged 39.4% of the litter collected as “non-sourced litter”.

But that still left a frightening 37.7% of the litter collected as having originated from the general public – as opposed to 13.8% fishing litter (nets, line, ropes, weights/hooks and buoys), 6.2% sewage-related litter (including tampons and the ever-present cotton bud) and 1.8% shipping litter (e.g. pallets, strapping and oil drums). Fly-tipping (0.9%) and medical litter (0.2%) make up the numbers.

Public litter is the largest source of beach litter across all 4 home countries, accounting for between 32% and 55% of the total litter collected and having an average density of 824 items per kilometre – that means nearly one piece of litter for every metre that you walk along the beach.

It is sad enough that we leave litter on the beach – a place of traditional relaxation and fun. But it is instructive to bear in mind that litter that is dropped by us inland can also be blown to the coast by winds or carried there by rivers. As you might expect, when it is dropped, litter either stays where it is or is propelled somewhere else – and that somewhere else may be the otherwise lovely beach that affords us so much pleasure.

So let’s spread the word and make sure that we and our friends sign up to MCS’s campaign to convince government that an action plan is needed to tackle marine litter. Visit www.mcsuk.org to add your name to the campaign.

Let’s also be less ready to blame all marine litter on sailors and fishermen and more ready to look landward for the main culprits. Perhaps we can then, as MCS hopes to achieve by 2015, enjoy a pleasant walk along the beach where the only human-generated signs that we see are our footprints in the sand.

The Policy Exchange think tank has recently published its “Litterbugs” report on how to deal with littering. The seven key recommendations are :

1. The re-establishment and reform of ENCAMS as the national body responsible for coordinating anti-littering initiatives, campaigns and programmes
2. The development of a permanent educational campaign with a consistent message to target littering
3. The provision of bins and ashtrays in strategic sites
4. The introduction of a national deposit scheme
5. Taking account of litter and littering behaviour in the design of our public spaces
6. Greater consistency in the application of penalties for littering across local authorities
7. The creation of a new Environmental Advisory Service to promote effective knowledge sharing

There is nothing particularly controversial in Policy Exchange’s recommendations. Some of what they propose is already well underway. For example, ENCAMS (ENvironmental CAMpaignS), which runs the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign, is making huge strides forward under its new Chief Executive, Phil Barton, who has now been leading the organisation for a year. Among other things, Keep Britain Tidy have introduced the excellent Big Tidy Up campaign to revive the “spring clean” concept and to encourage more people to get out there and clean up their neighbourhood.

The most controversial recommendation is probably the bottle deposit scheme idea. This concept appears intuitively sensible to the vast majority of us (and there are those of us who remember the days when you could return your bottles and reclaim the deposit) but there are strong pockets of resistance that claim that bottle deposit schemes don’t work – and the drinks industry is, not surprisingly, strongly against bottle deposits. Government has, so far, seemed reluctant to pursue the idea.

One aspect, though, which was not highlighted by Policy Exchange, is the significant and often undervalued contribution of volunteers. Volunteers have a huge part to play on the litter stage, not only by picking up litter from their surroundings but also by the subtle message that doing so sends out to other people. Seeing volunteers picking up litter makes people realise that this is something that they, too, can do and reminds them that dropping litter is not a positive action. Volunteer activity also gives people a golden opportunity to get involved in tackling the issue themselves and so feel that they are part of something worthwhile.

So, amid all the sensible suggestions of bottle deposits, positioning of litter bins, fines, design of public places and organisations that educate, campaign and coordinate on litter issues, let’s not forget the invaluable contribution of litter volunteers. Their efforts from the bottom up are a vital complement to all these other “top-down” initiatives.

An interesting survey has recently been published by Keep Britain Tidy highlighting the main fast food brands to be found littered in England. No prizes for guessing who topped the list. Yes – it was McDonalds (29%), followed some way behind by unbranded fast food packaging – (21% – e.g. fish and chip, burger and kebab shops) and then Greggs the bakers (18%) and KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) 8%. There was much debate in the press and also on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2.

What I found really fascinating about all the resultant discussion is that it wasn’t the usual McDonalds-bashing. For the first time that I can remember, comments were being made along the lines of “it isn’t McDonalds who actually drop this stuff on the ground – it’s their customers” – real, individual people.

That doesn’t mean that we can let McDonalds totally off the hook. We might reasonably expect McDonalds to ensure there are litter bins easily accessible for their customers and, of course, that their packaging is minimal and, where possible, biodegradable (i.e. not polystyrene – the indestructible, immortal bane of litter-pickers’ lives). But it does seem that McDonalds do at least try – what other fast food retailers have you heard of who, for many of their outlets, undertake to clear all the litter (and not just the litter coming from their store) from 100 metres either side of their stores on a daily basis ? Incidentally, I hope that loads of you will now contact me with details of many other fast food operators who do, in fact, clear up around their outlets.

I was talking with Tegryn Jones, who heads up Keep Wales Tidy, the other day. He made the point that you often find McDonalds litter 10 miles or more from a McDonalds store – a fact that I can certainly corroborate. How on earth can you blame that on McDonalds ? Perhaps a question to consider is : “What responsibility should we place on retailers if their products regularly end up as litter ?”

As if fast food litter isn’t bad enough already, we now hear that the tough economic climate is leading to people downgrading their eating-out habits and so purchasing more fast food, rather than usually pricier slow food. This suggests that the fast food litter problem could be about to get much worse.

So I think that it’s time that we started to refocus our attention and our angst on the people who are actually dropping their rubbish and who are, in a simple voluntary action, converting it into litter. We must, by all means, work with the fast food suppliers to ensure that their packaging is appropriate and minimal, that they do all that they can to remind their customers to dispose of their packaging correctly and, where possible, to contribute a bit of civic pride by cleaning up around their stores. But let’s not hold fast food suppliers totally accountable for the complete folly of their customers’ littering.

Words have always fascinated me and the word “litter” is no exception. It is derived from the Latin word “lectus” meaning bed.

Tracing the word through history, we find, of course, that a litter was a contraption for carrying people around in – a litter looked like a small carriage but with two poles protruding at the back and the front to enable it to be carried by two men who must, at least in the case of some passengers, have been fairly strong. It doesn’t surprise me, therefore, that while we have seen the introduction of bicycle rickshaws in some of our cities, there has been no nostalgic hankering for the reintroduction of the litter, environmentally-friendly transport though it may be – the level of fitness and endurance required of a litterman would be beyond most of us.

Anyway, I digress. The word litter developed a separate branch of usage which found it describing the bed of straw or shavings spread about the floor that farm animals live and sleep on. In fact, when such animals gave birth, their collective offspring were referred to as a “litter”. It was in the 1600s that “litter” began to be used in a more disparaging sense. We hear (from J. Howell) of the Duke who “offered to make litter of his life for the service of his Catholic Majesty the King” and in the 1700s Fielding tells us of a lady that “she was ashamed to be seen in such a pickle…her house was in such a litter”

In a closely related sense, “litter” was taken in the 1800s to refer to the covering of fallen leaves, sticks and other vegetation that carpet the forest floor.

The “rubbish” meaning of litter seems to appear in the mid 1800s as exemplified by Ruskin’s comment about the painter JMW Turner : “he particularly enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden wrecked after the market. His pictures are often full of it from side to side.”

Thereafter, litter proceeded all too quickly into the meaning that we now use to denote discarded rubbish. There was a popular song published by Eleanor Farjeon in 1927 entitled “Gather Up Your Litter”, which applies just as well today as it did then. Here is a sample verse :

Bottles have attractions great
Before the corks are drawn
But in a cracked and empty state
They don’t improve the lawn.
And after you’ve got busy
With a drink of something fizzy
Don’t leave behind a lot of empty glass
It’s apt to prove a danger
To the unsuspecting stranger
So do gather up your litter from the grass

Not long after this in 1929, Harry Hardy Peach (who was a founding member of the Campaign to Protect Rural England – CPRE, or “Council for the Preservation of Rural England” as it was then known) published a fascinating collection of rhymes, notices, stories and suggestions entitled “Let Us Tidy Up”. He laments that “the problem of litter, like that of disfigurement by advertisement, which is the real litter, has grown out of our laissez faire of the nineteenth century”.

It’s strange, isn’t it, that the term we use to describe the unsightly rubbish that we drop all over the place actually means “bed”, a place where most of us like to be and which evokes thoughts of rest, love and comfort ?