Menace of car litter in the countryside grows

The cleanliness of our streets has once again improved for the fourth year in five, but a rising tide of sweet wrappers, drinks bottles and fast food packaging is threatening to ruin our clean green image.

Those are part of the findings of an extensive TIDY Northern Ireland litter survey released today (Friday 5th March 2010) that found 92% of streets met government standards for litter during 2009. While this is an improvement on the 11% failure rate of the previous year, both cigarette litter and confectionery related litter has been on the increase during the same period.

For virtually all areas surveyed, covering all 26 councils, the top three litter items encountered were cigarette, confectionary and chewing gum. However, rural areas have unique problems, with high levels of litter being chucked out of passing cars. Drinks, confectionary and fast food litter were the main items defiling our beautiful countryside, all being found on over 60% of surveyed roads.

"It is pleasing to see further confirmation that Northern Ireland is getting cleaner, but it is a constant battle to keep litter off our streets and we are seeing some worrying trends that need to be addressed immediately," said TIDY Northern Ireland Chief Executive, Dr Ian Humphreys. "The continual increase in cigarette litter following the introduction of the public smoking ban is perhaps not as surprising as the dramatic ongoing rise in confectionery litter. Our countryside too is not immune to defilement seeing a rising tide of fast food litter and drinks litter making a real mess of our environment, spoiling the enjoyment for local people and tourists alike.

If we are to continue reporting improvements in litter levels then people need to change their attitudes. It requires very little effort to hold onto rubbish until you are near a bin to dispose of it, but people's careless attitude to the problem means councils are forced to spend £30 million a year of rate payer's money on cleaning up the mess we leave in our wake."

Over the past year TIDY Northern Ireland's surveyors have scrutinised over 1,000 public sites in the Northern Ireland Litter Survey, searching for litter on the pavements and recording the types and sources of litter across a variety of different land use types. The Litter Survey revealed that cigarette litter is now present on almost three quarters of our streets, with confectionery litter found on 60% of areas surveyed. While dog fouling is regarded as one of the worst forms of litter it was one of the least frequent offenders, being found on only 3% of streets