When did we become a nation of litter louts?

Litter in the UK has increased by 500 per cent in the past 50 years. Lockdown brought with it a new plastic pollution problem – face coverings. Andy Martin delves into the psychology behind Britain’s dirty little secret

We celebrated lockdown with a festival of litter, all over the beaches and in every far-flung inland beauty spot (Getty)

His name was Fred. He was being treated for OCD by a clinical psychologist friend of mine, Alf. Fred’s OCD took a very specific and unusual form. You know how litter louts will simply dump their rubbish anywhere anytime? Well, Fred was the exact opposite: he was a picker-upper, on a heroic scale. And, you may say, a very good thing too. If we have litter louts (and we do), then surely we need our picker-uppers too? And in fact we do indeed have small armies of civic-minded citizens, intent on keeping our green and pleasant lands green and pleasant, so far as possible. Protecting the environment and wildlife. Thanks to them, cows won’t have to die choking on plastic bags, and fish and ducks won’t have to suck up all the cigarette butts and assorted detritus we are apt to chuck in every brook and river.

But consider the fundamental reality for Fred. One day he really wants to get to the station to catch a train to attend an important meeting. But as soon as he gets outside his front door he spots a Coke can on the pavement. Has to stop and pick it up. Then, as he walks further down the street, he stoops to pick up a Burger King bag, then a few of those totally unrecyclable Styrofoam boxes, topped off with numerous sauce sachets. Before he can get anywhere near the station he has been obliged to stop again and again to pick up one thing or another. Imagine the number of cigarette butts (which are made of cellulose, not paper) between A and B. Maybe the odd sofa or mattress too. It’s like a Zeno’s paradoxes in which there is an infinity of garbage preventing you ever getting anywhere. Needless to say, Fred does not make it to that important meeting or the station. Instead of that he is carrying a giant sack around, like Father Christmas, filled with presents you don’t want donated by idiots.

My friend Alf eventually worked out a way of treating Fred. He called it “mimetic deterrence”. He would go out with Fred, and as soon as he spotted an offending item in the street he would swoop and pick it up before Fred could. Eventually Fred would say to him. “What’s wrong with you? You’ll never get anything done if you’re stopping to pick up litter all the time!” Never a truer word.

As a nation, we celebrated the end of lockdown with a festival of litter. There were explosions of garbage all over the beaches of Britain and in every far-flung inland beauty spot. Nowhere escaped, from Land’s End to John O’Groats. A band of tireless litter louts stormed up and down the country, camping and picnicking, taking in the Lake District and the coves of Cornwall, dumping their personal pollution in every available nook and cranny. The “Freds” of the world were instantly mobilised. I’m probably one of them, from time to time. As is my friend Jonathan in Cambridge, who regularly sends me pictures of previously idyllic scenes where a litter bomb has gone off. Of course, these Freds are not suffering from OCD, they are just doing their bit in the ongoing battle against litter.

For some it’s a serious, full-time job. I spoke to one man, who prefers to be identified only as “Stu”, who is the “cleansing manager” of a large local council on the south coast. He’s a hero. Speaking to him, I was reminded more than once of Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches… we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills… We shall never surrender!” But sometimes it must feel like King Canute trying to hold the tide back. Every day during the high season Stu has to send out a battalion of bin men and women to clean up his city and the surrounding coastline. “And you should see the car parks,” he adds. “You’re knee-deep in garbage.” He admits that “it feels like Groundhog Day – you’re just doing the same thing over and over again”. They – the great cleansing managers of this world – are also up against organised gangs of fly-tippers dumping whole lorry-loads of waste all over the show and making good money out of it. The Environment Agency has called fly-tipping “the new narcotics” and has traced links to human trafficking and illegal firearms.

Despite all the Freds and Stus, the situation is getting worse. The amount of litter in Britain has increased by 500 per cent over the past 50 years. We – in the shape of our local councils – are now spending £800m a year to keep the country looking decent. Founded in 1960, Keep Britain Tidy has been fighting the good fight against litter, in a polite, educational way, for over half a century. Running campaign after campaign – National Spring Clean Day, Clean for the Queen, Tidy Britain Year, and so on. And putting up lots of posters. But all to no avail. “They’re a bunch of glorified litter-pickers,” fumes John Read.

Read is the trenchant powerhouse campaigner behind Clean Up Britain, an alternate, more combative organisation dedicated to “behavioural change”, set up against the background of the problem getting worse rather than better. I think it is fair to say he is not a fan of Keep Britain Tidy. “They’re mopping up while the tap’s still running. They will be doing it forever – until they die.” He argues that “they are only treating the symptoms – we are focusing on the underlying cause, the behaviour. They’re hard-wired for failure. We’re looking for a solution.” Or, as he neatly sums it up: “The time for f***ing around is over.  Although the government has yet to get that message."

I can already be fined £1,000 for not cleaning up after my dog in the local park. But for litter most councils only charge between £80 and £100. They discount if it’s paid within 14 days

According to Read, Britain is the dirtiest country in the western world. “You can drive through France and it looks impeccable. You arrive in Britain and it’s an eyesore. It’s an embarrassment.” He gives due credit to the Freds of the world. There are between three and four thousand groups of litter-pickers in this country. “They’re community-spirited and full of good intentions and should be commended,” says Read.  “But all the McDonald’s boxes and Coke cans and Cadbury’s wrappers and crisp packets will be back there a couple of weeks later.” He blames “spineless politicians and ineffective civil servants” (especially Defra) for doing nothing. Clean Up Britain has recently launched a campaign, Don’t Trash Our Future, which aims to up the fine for littering from £150 to £1,000 and to legally require local councils to enforce the existing laws (you can sign a petition to this effect too).

“It’s a crazy situation,” he says. “I can already be fined £1,000 for not cleaning up after my dog in the local park. But for litter most councils only charge between £80 and £100. They discount if it’s paid within 14 days. The ultimate fine is as low as £40, a curry-and-a-beer night out for many people. It’s no deterrent whatsoever – and it’s one of the reasons why we have a litter epidemic in this country.” He says that the fine is on a par with other countries – in California it’s $1,000; in Massachussetts, it’s $10,000. New South Wales will fine you $2,200. A new “Don’t Mess With Texas” campaign promises $2,000, especially for dropping face masks in the street. “Twenty-five years in prison is a long, long time,” says Read. “But I don’t need to worry about it because I’m not going to stick a knife into someone’s back. It’s the same with a £1,000 fine – if you don’t do it in the first place, it’s not a problem. We are heading towards climate catastrophe. And it’s all to do with our mistreatment of the environment. If we can’t even get people to stick their KFC junk in the bin, then we’re stuffed.”

Jeremy Paxman, the television presenter and former BBC grand inquisitor, is the patron of Clean Up Britain and a fervent supporter of a more aggressive approach. “This is a beautiful country,” he says. “And we treat it as if it were a rubbish dump.” He is particularly incensed by people chucking rubbish out of car windows and the “mountains of crap” left on the roadside. “We used to be a nation of shopkeepers. We aren’t any more, we’re a nation of litter louts.” Clean Up Britain has a host of celebrity supporters, including Gary Lineker and Clare Balding. They are backing a series of behaviour-modifying trials in Warwick and Leamington Spa, under the heading “It’s Now or Never”.

But there is a residual mystery, still to be solved: why do we drop litter? We don’t have to do it, but we do. I was given a lifelong lesson, aged six, by Miss Purdie. She had taken my infant’s class to London Zoo. My mother had given me a hard-boiled egg (and other things, no doubt) for a packed lunch. Seated on a bench outside, I cracked open the egg and breezily scattered the shell fragments on the ground. “You mustn’t do that,” said Miss Purdie. “You don’t want the animals eating it, do you?” I didn’t, so I picked up the eggshell and put it all in the bin. Job done and lesson learned. So one explanation of the mystery is that not everyone has a Miss Purdie or the equivalent.

We have to take account of the rise of takeaway culture since those far-off days. We live not only in an obesogenic environment – accosted at every street corner by KFCs and Burger Kings – but by a pollutogenic one. There is simply more packaging than ever. It seems likely that those who are least invested in society – the luckless, the alienated, the hard-done-by – are the most likely to litter. Read lists half a dozen possible explanations: desire not to conform to social norms, conformity with peers (a kind of littering hysteria or mass litteracy), ignorance, stupidity, laziness, selfishness. He reckons that around 20 million people, 30 per cent of the population, admit to littering, but most repeat offenders belong to the 16 to 25-year-old male bracket.

But if we want to get to the bottom of the mystery, we need to go back to the days of witchcraft and witch executions. In 1566, around the time of the birth of Shakespeare, in newly Puritan England, Agnes Waterhouse, also known as “Mother Waterhouse”, was executed for witchcraft in Essex. She was the first to be put to death for the crime in this country (needless to say, she was not the last). She was found guilty on account of witness testimonies from a 12-year-old girl, a toad and a dog. The toad apparently told the girl all about it and the dog confirmed it by wagging his tail at the witch’s house in Hatfield Peverell. It was an open-and-shut case. But what exactly was Mother Waterhouse supposed to have done with all her evil spells (in Latin) and a cat called Satan? One man died and another one fell ill, in mysterious circumstances. One or two cows likewise. Surely, then, someone must have intended for them to fall ill and die? They needed a scapegoat: Agnes Waterhouse was the right candidate for the job.

This is about more than litter. It could change the whole face of the Anthropocene: instead of idiots blundering around and killing everything in our path, we could become careful guardians

Manifestly absurd, of course, and almost certainly malicious, and yet the fate of Agnes Waterhouse testifies to a certain cultural code, which we can call “the overestimation of intentionality”. The allegation of witchcraft was not incompatible with the rising scientific expectation of a relationship between cause and effect: if somebody died, then there had to be a cause for it. And in the absence of more visible causes, then the two-legged kind (especially when female) constituted a reasonable hypothesis – even if dependent on the evidence of a miraculous talking toad. Agnes Waterhouse was found guilty of “bewitching to death” William Fynne and was hanged.

I only mention her case in order to suggest that society has now spun around in the opposite direction: towards the underestimation of intentionality. Now no one is responsible for anything. Everything is the subject of genetic determinism or unconscious impulses or the random operation of quantum particles. In other words, all of the phenomena which were invisible to the eye of 16th-century Essex have now eclipsed and blotted out any notion of personal responsibility. Post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Schrödinger, we live in an era of involuntarism, minimal culpability and maximum planetary attrition. Climate change denial, for example, depends precisely on a dissociation of cause and effect. It’s nobody’s fault. Even the concept of the “anthropocene” in universalising causation effectively absolves anyone in particular. When litter louts united dump all their collective garbage on Brighton beach, they are only reflecting a cultural bias against assuming personal responsibility. Even the word “litter” itself – a weak word, we really need something stronger – suggests a natural phenomenon, not of our causing.

“Littering is a crime,” says Read. His campaign is an attempt to revalidate responsibility and relocate it squarely in individuals who would be subject to legal sanction. I remember once trying something similar myself in a rough and ready sort of para-judicial way. There were two men – in the age bracket specified by Read as comprising the major culprits – ambling along on the opposite side of the street to me, going in the opposite direction. They were both drinking, one from a can, the other from a bottle. Bottle Guy, having finished drinking, carelessly chucked his bottle down on the pavement, right next to a conveniently placed bin. It didn’t smash but just rolled around and stopped. Can Guy just looked at it. As did I. And they both saw me looking at them. Feeling a little bit like Miss Purdie, only with a much greater death wish, I marched across the road and picked up the bottle and waved it right in the his face. I was more John Read than Keep Britain Tidy. I had a feeling polite remonstration wasn’t going to fly, so I went straight for the nuclear option. Seemingly bewildered by my reckless and possibly bonkers self-abandon, they actually complied and meekly wandered off, muttering words of contrition.

I’m not recommending this approach to other concerned citizens and I probably wouldn’t try this again. But it seems to me that, translated into a more data-driven system, we need something similar, re-connecting individuals and their packaging. We need to remember that the can or bottle or box does not in fact belong to Coca-Cola or Red Bull or a certain Mr McDonald, even though it has their names all over it. It belongs to me, because I just bought it, and I need to be conscious that I own it. It has become mine not theirs and not Tesco’s either. It’s a small difference that could make a big difference.

This is about more than litter. It could change the whole face of the Anthropocene: instead of idiots blundering around and killing everything in our path, we could become careful guardians of the planet. Turning the zeitgeist around could take a little while, but shifting the mindset on litter would nudge the needle in the right direction.

There is one final mystery very much of our time. How does it come about that we can dump disposable face masks all over the street or on station platforms or on beaches or in remote beauty spots? We have taken the trouble to try and prevent others being infected by Covid-19 and yet at the same time we can shove the mask (together with any associated droplets) anywhere we please? It’s paradoxical and yet commonplace. The explanation can only be the massive normalisation of litter. That and an attitude which seems to be summarised in the word that is otherwise meaningless, except as an expression of a despairing sense of meaninglessness: “Whatever!”

Andy Martin is the author of Surf, Sweat and Tears: the Epic Life and Mysterious Death of Edward George William Omar Deerhurst.