Rubbish!
Mark Lewinski takes a trip from Swaffham Prior to Burwell, and reports back.. .
ONE DAY IN AUGUST, cycling from Burwell to Swaffham Prior, I noticed there seemed to be a lot of litter scattered along the grass verge. You don't see it when you're in a car. I estimated there was probably something about every couple of paces, if you were to walk it - so I went back and did just that. Here's the total for just one side of one road between two villages. Multiply by hundreds of thousands of miles of rural roads to get an idea of the state of the country.
It's what the Great British public is doing to its countryside, folks:
- 303 - items of plastic packaging
- 134 - plastic bottles
- 103 - drinks cans
- 71 - paper items
- 3 - glass bottles
- 1 - watering can
- 9 - bits fallen off cars
- 10 - Macdonalds takeaway packaging
- 1 - Burger King packaging
- 2 - beer mats
- 1 - mangled metal drum
- 2 - lengths of plastic liner, rolled and taped up
- 4 - lengths of rope
- 1 - laminated Police notice - 'Don't leave valuables in your car'
- 34 - cigarette packets (and one cigar tin)
- 4 - industrial gloves
- 9 dead animals/birds; one big, very decomposed thing, a large badger (or a small bear?)
- 10 - polystyrene objects
- 1 - television set (yes, there are still those who can be bothered to drive halfway between two villages, stop, and dump a tv - but can't be arsed to drive the few extra miles to Newmarket recycling tip)
- 2 - bits of cloth
- 4 - lengths of wood
- 1 - England flag
Do the maths at your leisure to see how close I was to my estimate, @ one pace = 1 yard. I counted up in the 9/10 of a mile from the edge of Burwell to the Swaffham Prior sign.
This was all that was easy to see: there was obviously quite a lot more. Every few paces I would step on another plastic bottle not visible under the grass. Point to ponder: The nearest Macdonalds outlet is nearly ten miles away, in Cambridge.
I used to see much more of their packaging than this on the roadside when I lived outside a village three miles from a Macdonalds in Essex.
Macdonalds has claimed that its packaging does not contribute to littering the countryside.
I've never seen much dumped junk by the roadside when travelling in Europe. I see huge amounts here. What is it about the British that makes it normal to throw rubbish out of car windows?