Despite all of our recycle and reuse campaigns, there is still a fair amount of litter out there on our streets these days...
This is in part due to some council councils reducing the number of public litter bins to save money, but claiming somehow this is about making people more responsible - the idea being that fewer litter bins are supposed to make people take their litter home with them...
It's just that it doesn't work like that in the UK - people feel like councils SHOULD be providing public litter bins (damned right) and if there are none, then just leave the litter (subtly) somewhere anyway.
And then there's the fact that people tend to adjust to their surroundings. If a place looks messy, standards just drop fast.
Another factor that doesn't help public littering is the normalisation of packaging for consumables - I'm thinking here coffees and lunches and snacks - it is almost impossible to buy something these days without packaging!
Today's public waste is about carelessness and councils pulling back. When councils cut services, and individuals stop caring, nobody feels responsible for our shared spaces. Sociologically, this shows a fading of our shared social norms. If public spaces are treated like they're disposable, people will treat them that way. Environmental psychology studies continually show that when things look messy, it encourages even more mess – kind of like the broken windows theory, but without the punishment.
Litter is a visible sight that trust in society is weakening and our expectations for public services are shrinking.
The government seeming to give less of a toss over how clean our streets are is almost depoliticising the issue... it is a relatively small thing to provide sufficient public bins and pay people to empty them regularly - sufficient to meet demand for them.
But insstead we've got this roll-back and underfunding that means even keeping the streets clean has become individualised to an extent!
