Pollards Hill Rubbish
It’s bad isn’t it? The rubbish I mean, not Pollards Hill. Pollards Hill is full of good people who would like to make it a better place to live, to bring up children, to bring the grandkids round to, but it can feel like an uphill struggle when you open your door in the morning and three crisp packets blow in. This happened to a colleague of mine. Or two or three paces down the pavement as you stride out to improve the world, you step in dog poo. Or, like our friend Val, you can’t even walk down the pavement any more and you have to walk on the road because there are two cars parked partly on the pavement and partly on the road, they are sworn off the road, rubbish has accumulated all around them and they have been there for two years.
Now writing about all that here won’t make it better. But we should note the number of people at the public meeting on 8th August in the New Horizon Centre, who said they were fed up about the state of littering, the bins and the extent of fly-tipping in the ward. I’m not just talking about the Moat Homes estate here: our friends the Friends of Mitcham Common can tell us a tale or too about the things they find in the bushes and elsewhere, there are some wild and quite colourful stories about what gets left behind the alleygates for example. It’s all distressing and it’s all dirty. It saps the energy and sours the mood of anyone who got up that morning thinking today was the day they would do their bit to make the world a better place.
We can and should look at why people litter. By this I mean why don’t people put their rubbish in a bin or take it home and put it in a bin? Cigarette ends, empty cans, crisp packets etc. We’ve all seen someone else do it. Maybe some of us have done it ourselves (are your sure?). There’s more than one school of thought about bins: some people argue that there ‘should be more bins’ because people won’t put rubbish in a bin if they can’t see one, and others argue that if you put more bins out this encourages people to throw away more stuff, bins have to be emptied, sorted etc, so fewer, specialised bins may be better, particularly if you are the person paying for the bins to be emptied and the rubbish to be sorted. What I do know, because I have seen it with my own eyes, is that these interesting bin experiments don’t go on in Pollards Hill. New bins are trialled in Wimbledon and Morden and sometimes Mitcham, but over here we’ve got some bins that probably date from the 19070s. Vintage! Changing the bins won’t automatically change behaviours, but it would help if people felt like they were part of the bigger, borough picture, and frankly, many don’t.
That aside, what are we doing to make sure that children and young people don’t drop litter? I’m not sure, maybe some people are doing quite a lot and I thank them for it, but no matter what it is, I don’t think it’s working very well. In the hot weather, outside the back of the New Horizon Centre, we regularly have school students letting off steam with a water fight after school This is understandable and must be fun. Nothing wrong with that. But when they have run out of water they leave the empty plastic bottles all over the field! We need better and more constructive dialogue with school leaders so that we are able to flag this up and reinforce a no-littering message. We know that telling a child or young person (or an adult for that matter) just once, doesn’t necessarily get the message across and that developing a new habit takes at least three weeks and that is when one is trying quite hard to form a new habit. We also know that that if parents, carers or family members also drop litter, the children will copy. So consistent, concerted family and community efforts may provide some of the answers here.
Then there are the bins. Oh the bins! How many conversations do I have about bins in a week? A LOT!!!! I take photos of bins and submit them, I take photos of bins and they sit on my phone reminding me what a mess I saw that day. There are several things going on:
People use them but don’t check to make sure they are putting non-recyclables/ recyclables in the correct bin.
People use the right recycling bin but they put it all in a plastic bag which undermines the good job they did of sorting the rubbish to begin with.
People don’t put their rubbish in a bin. They leave it by the side of the bin or on the roof of the bins. This is fly-tipping by the way, and you can be fined.
People bring things to the bins that they shouldn’t. By this I mean old beds, mattresses, shelves, rolls of carpet, half-finished tins of paint, toilet bowls (all real examples I have seen with my own eyes). They might say ‘well, someone else might want it’ but let’s face it, they know that’s not true and so do you and I. It is a lazy and inconsiderate act, whether or not they feel that they can’t afford to do anything else.
The plain truth is we live on a small island in a densely populated part of it and we are all producing too much waste. It’s expensive to dispose of or recycle, it’s expensive to collect and whatever we do, it never has a positive effect on the environment and is never carbon neutral. There are various ways of trying to encourage or force people to produce less waste like cutting down on plastic packaging, reducing the number of times a month the bins are collected, reducing the volume that can be collected in the bins, segregating waste etc. Some are more successful than others. My personal favourite would be to ban the sale of disposable nappies but I don’t think it’s viable in a democracy – not right now anyway. But I do hate them with a passion ever since I a used one fly out of an open window on the second floor and land just in front of me. Another true story.
And then there are the fly-by-night fly-tippers – the people who will clear your house or garden ‘for cheap’ and who load up the van with your gubbins only to offload it again in someone else’s back yard, right on the road (eg Cedars Avenue), on Mitcham Common, or by someone else’s bins (eg Berkshire Way). Thus they avoid paying for the weight of it at the waste disposal centres. We all want to catch these guys as they are the easiest to blame, although the number of people asking for cheap quotes to have houses and gardens cleared on platforms like Next Door suggests that we are not really thinking things through to a logical and honest conclusion. They are certainly in the wrong but are we sure we are all in the right? Hmmmm….
But I do wonder if we could make our own lives easier by taking more care to sort our own rubbish, talk to our toddlers about what we are doing, teach them to do it too, use the correct bin, buy less of the stuff we don’t actually need, put the litter in a bin or a pocket and take it home. Could we?
Come and discuss this and other related matter, including anti-social behaviour, fear of crime, nuisance door knocking, noisy parties with us any Monday morning in the community café in the New Horizon Centre from 11am. We will listen, we will help you to report the stuff that really matters to you and we can, with you, make things a bit less rubbish.
From Keep Britain Tidy Website
Dog mess is the most unacceptable and offensive type of litter on our streets. Our research tells us that dog fouling is the issue the public are most concerned about.
Dog fouling is not only deeply unpleasant, it is dangerous. Whilst rare, contact with dog excrement can cause toxocariasis – a nasty infection that can lead to dizziness, nausea, asthma and even blindness or seizures.
It’s no wonder dog fouling is such a problem – there are estimated to be more than 8 million dogs producing more than 1,000 tonnes of mess every day in the UK alone.
While most dog owners are caring, responsible individuals, there are still some people who do not clean up after their pets.
Anyone who fails to clear up after their dog can be issued with a Fixed Penalty Notice of up to £100. If the case goes to court this could cost the owner or person in charge of the animal up to £1,000.
The law states that being unaware a dog has fouled or not having a suitable bag is not a reasonable excuse.
Monday morning Community Meetings
How was your weekend?
Was your weekend was spoilt by:
- noise, fly-tipping or anti-social behaviour?
- worrying about a neighbour or a lost cat?
- being fed up about seeing ‘that’ again on your back doorstep?
- feeling unsafe coming home or feeling too nervous to go out?
- not feeling safe in your own home?
Come to the Monday morning community café at the New Horizon Centre (CR4 1LT) between 11am and 12 noon and talk to us about what bothers you and what you would like to do or see done about it.
New Horizon Centre, South Lodge Avenue, Pollards Hill, CR4 1LT
Buses 255, 60, 463, 152
We have hot drinks and biscuits, sometimes cake, for a suggested donation and we don’t turn people away for lack of money. We can advise how to report things, help you with this, show you how to report anonymously or just take a note and pass it on to the police or others services.
We want to know what’s going wrong and what’s going right and will always try to help.
If you prefer to report to the Met Police you can ring 101 (non-emergency services), online report https://www.police.uk/pu/contact-us/ or report anonymously on Crimestoppers 0800 555 111 https://crimestoppers-uk.org/
The views expressed in this article are those of the Post author.
