If you’re like most people, myself included, you brush the offending bit of detritus onto the floor without a second thought. Imagine for a moment that you look down on your shirt and see a crumb from your lunch, a loose thread or strand of hair, or perhaps a bit of fluff from the tumble dryer. This has given me a lot of time to think about the potential reasons for littering, and I have assembled all of these into this handy-dandy summary. Over the past four years I have written the Off the Ground blog and helped remove nearly 400 bags of rubbish and over 10,000 items of recyclables from the streets of my community. Instead, we will continue to engage in litter pick after litter pick with no end in sight.
Until we recognise that there are a myriad of reasons and contexts-and no one-size-fits-all solution-then we cannot take the necessary steps towards actually stopping the problem. Indeed, previous research into the subject highlights that rather than looking at the world as composed of two types of people-those who never litter and those who always do-it is best to think of “ littering incidents“: situations where people choose to litter based on context rather than strictly based on demographics.
After all, how many times have you heard someone say the follow (or said these words yourself): “Well, it made sense to me at the time …” Human behaviour is such that they wouldn’t do it otherwise. However, it’s also important to try to understand what drives littering behaviour in the UK if we want to have any hope of developing interventions to stop it.Īfter all, littering may not make sense to those who don’t litter, but it is perfectly logical to someone who does. And it’s fantastic that so many people recognise the importance of keeping our communities and countryside clean and tidy for ourselves and our wildlife. Words to this effect are what I hear most often when running a community litter pick. “I just don’t understand why people litter! It makes no sense!”
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