One of my guilty pleasures is watching YouTube travel videos, made by overseas visitors to Scotland and the UK.
It’s interesting to see and hear an unfiltered, instant impression of where you live, partly because you have pride in where you live and you hope folk have a nice time, but also because it’s nice to have positive aspects about your home pointed out to you that you’ve forgotten about, taken for granted, or perhaps not even considered before. In short, as a country, it can make us feel better about ourselves.
So there I was, watching one such vlog last week, which I’ve been keenly watching as they’ve made their way around the UK – an American couple, using bikes to cycle from England to Scotland. Last week, as they departed these shores, they uploaded ‘Q&A after 600 miles and 4 months in the UK’
To the question, ‘What’s the best thing about the UK?’, they said:
‘It’s a little cheesy, but I think the people. They’re so sweet and kind. People are always asking if we’re okay and asking if we need directions’
“Yeah, people here are so nice. Everyone in the UK, from top to bottom, has just been nice. We haven’t run into a single rude person.’
But then came the question, ‘What’s the worst thing about the UK?’
I naively assumed they’d say the weather or, given they’ve been cycling on roads most of the time, perhaps potholes. But no.
Litter!
You could tell they were utterly baffled by it, given that everything else in their experience had been positive.
“We’ve been in 40 countries and littering is, for some reason, a massive thing in the UK.
‘It’s the cities, it’s the countryside, it’s the country roads. There’s just trash everywhere.
‘I don’t know what’s going on. There must be something I guess, culturally, there’s never been a public awareness campaign or something?’
How depressing is that? That litter should form part of the lasting impression overseas visitors have of this place. It reminded of this tweet I posted in January 2020, while walking part of the Fife Pilgrim Way:
‘The only downside of the day was the time spent walking alongside main roads. Not cos they’re roads but cos of the amount of crap chucked onto verges. It’s not a problem unique to Fife by any means. Embarrassing, knowing how folk come from around the world to walk our trails.’
Litter isn’t everywhere in Scotland, not by any stretch of the imagination, and you can quite easily travel around without really noticing. But my general perception is that we have a terrible problem with litter in this country.
I don’t really travel overseas any more, so I have few reference points to compare us against, but I find it hard to believe that other comparable countries are as bad as us.
I’ve only been to Norway in recent years and I can’t recall seeing rubbish anywhere. But that’s Norway for goodness sake.
I remember sitting in an Edinburgh pub after I’d finished work, with friends who were visiting from Norway. They asked how my day had been and I said it was pretty normal, y’know, litterpicking, and removing dog poo from trees. The usual.
This was met with blank expressions, so I clarified.
‘Yeah, you know, when people bag the poo and fling it in a tree afterwards?’
Nope, they had no idea what I was talking about. How nice for them!
It’s not just dog poo of course. A recent Scottish Government review into littering estimated that 250 million visible items are dropped in Scotland every year. And without question, roadsides and verges are where most of it seems to end up.
This is undoubtedly why the Americans got such a bad impression. When you’re riding a bike on a road, you’ve got a kerbside view of the verge…..and it’s not pretty.
As I’m not much of a road cyclist I didn’t have any sense of the scale of the problem until 2013, when I started working in the kind of jobs where I was looking after greenspaces and cycleways etc close to busy main roads. I genuinely couldn’t believe how much rubbish there was.
Between April 2024 and March 2025, BEAR Scotland, who look after the country’s trunk roads, collected 57,970kg of litter (in 8,278 bags) from the motorway and dual carriageway verges in southeast Scotland. Where on earth does it all come from?! Do people REALLY chuck it out of cars?
While some of the litter will have blown-in from elsewhere, a Keep Britain Tidy survey in 2012 found that 21% of drivers had seen litter thrown from vehicles. Personally, I’ve only ever seen it happen once, but a similar national survey of over 2000 drivers in 2021 found that:
16% of drivers reported that they had disposed of an item of rubbish from a vehicle window, and 6% reported that they had done so within the last year.
There are more than 3 million licensed vehicles in Scotland. Even if only 16% of those vehicles are chucking stuff out their windows, that’s still 480,000 litter dispensers driving along our roads.
Reading the genuine public responses in 2021’s Understanding Vehicle Littering (UVL) survey makes for shocking reading.
‘if I know I’m getting out the car in five minutes I’ll just take it with me. But if I know I’m going to be stuck in the car for another hour or so, I’ll throw it out.”
‘“I think it’s just because it’s just quickly out of the car, and you know it’s gone and it’s not your problem anymore. I don’t have to go home and think, ‘I’ve got to get my daughter out the car, I’ve got to get everything out, oh and I’ve got to get the rubbish”
It’s not just roadsides of course. Litter is conspicuous in all sorts of places. I remember the first ‘dirty campsite’ I ever saw. It was 2007, and I was a fresh-faced, naïve, volunteer ranger in the Pentland Hills. I was sent on patrol to Bonaly Reservoir, where I found what could only be described as a camper explosion. Socks, shoes, pants, bottles etc, all scattered randomly and widely around a ripped tent.
It’s funny. When you go to ranger school they don’t tell you about litterpicking. And yet a disproportionate amount of my ranger career so far has been spent doing exactly that.
In the early years I tried to make light of it, so that it wouldn’t get me down. If I found an Irn Bru bottle or can (and I did, all the time), I’d post a pic of it online with the caption ‘how do you tell if it’s a Scottish <insert context here>’, with the context changing depending on where the item was found or what it was near. Some of my favourites were:
How do you tell if it’s a Scottish World Heritage Site?
How do you tell if it’s a Scottish 19th Century shooting lodge?
How do you tell if it’s a Scottish pet cemetery?
How do you tell if it’s a Scottish fairy pool?
How do you tell if it’s a Scottish fly agaric?
But eventually I gave up. Partly because it never seemed to end, but mostly because I eventually ran out of different things/settings to cite and be creative with. After a few years I’d seen Irn Bru litter everywhere. I’d exhausted all the possible contexts.
But it’s not just Irn Bru cans, of course. I’ve seen so much more besides, and listing the weirder discoveries reminds me of some dark version of the conveyor belt at the end of the Generation Game.
A gazebo with sleeping bag
The head of a doll
A bible and a can of Tennent’s.
A horde of plastic action figures.
Soiled nappies stuffed into a car park wall.
A condom, plastic knife and coffee cup on a mattress.
A CUDDLY TOY!
Socks! But only ever single socks. Never a pair.
And pants. Lots and lots of pants. All over Scotland.
And that’s before you even got to the tsunami of flytipping. 26,000 tonnes of it per year, (according to ScotGov) most of which felt like it washed up at the greenspaces we managed: sacks of bread rolls; tyres; sofas; washing machines; oil drums; entire kitchens.
It would sit there for weeks. Nobody would report it, partly because they probably thought the council already knew about it, and partly because litter on that scale is completely normalised.
I don’t know how this all compares to other countries. Are they all just as bad as us? Replies over the years to any of my litter moans online have certainly prompted replies from overseas folk, from Massachusetts to Macedonia, all lamenting the same thing.
Not that it matters though, really. There’s no need to compare yourself to anywhere else when you can see the problem with your own eyes, and your own eyes tell you it is clearly very bad.
The thing is, it’s not as though people don’t care, or there aren’t people here taking action. They do. They are. And the evidence of this is everywhere.
Over the seven years I worked in West Lothian, I saw the same elderly lady in Threemiletown on my drive to work, at least once a week, walking the roadside with a full bin bag in one hand, and litterpickers in the other.
Only last week in Markinch, as I was walking up to the railway station, the lady in front of me stopped to pick up two bits of litter outside the station door, and popped them in the adjacent bin. It wasn’t her responsibility. It wasn’t her litter. But she took it upon herself to do something.
In the hills, it’s the accepted norm to carry litter out when you find it. And indeed, most folk I know carry a plastic bag for that express purpose, just in case.
There’s barely a beach in the country that doesn’t have a community beach clean. Some beaches in Fife even have litterpicks hanging up for public use. And only last month, our workplace took part in a source-to-sea litter pick in Aberdeenshire.
Litter picking is weirdly popular. In my ranger experience, no events ever garnered as much local interest as the greenspace clean-ups and litterpicks. Whole cub/scout troops would come along. Family groups – kids, parents and grandparents. Long term residents and newcomers alike.
That’s because people felt strongly about their local communities and greenspaces, wanted to do something, and did it with good humour and enthusiasm. Community litterpicks were therefore often the most enjoyable, and certainly best attended of any events the ranger service organised.
Trouble is, you really needed a small army to deal with litter on that scale, and West Lothian Litter Pickers was one such army – An unstoppable force of 700 members at the time, but now more in the region of 4000, figuratively and literally sweeping the county.
For a time, when I was working there, their pace of growth and enthusiasm quite literally overwhelmed the council’s ability to deal with the rubbish they were bagging-up.
In an age of austerity and cut-backs it’s not surprising that community litter picking has been taken-up by the voluntary sector. Collectively, volunteers have both the numbers and the time to do this kind of thing. That’s both amazing and commendable, but whether it’s a good thing or not that volunteers have to make up the difference, I’ll leave up to you to decide.
But regardless of whether it’s cleared by council employees or volunteers, it is still someone picking up someone else’s litter. Same cause. Same effect. And regardless of who picks it up, it just comes back.
I therefore wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling apathetic when they try to keep their communities clean. One lady told me:
‘I litter pick round the village – often wonder how everyone can walk past it & ignore it but I enjoy looking at a clear area. But no sooner is it cleared than new stuff gets dumped & I am not sure why I bother! ‘
That’s certainly what struck me after our ranger-led community clean-ups – how quickly a place could succumb once again. It was never a one-off. The clean-ups had to be regular, because that’s how fast the litter would accumulate.
The Real Food Café in Tyndrum is a case in point. They started organising community litterpicks in Tyndrum in 2020, clearing away 28 sacks of litter from the village on their first attempt. Five years later, eight litterpicks per year are needed to stay on top of the problem.
Baling-out the bath like that is necessary of course, if it helps prevent your home from flooding, but it’s time-consuming, mentally exhausting, and ultimately will never end unless you turn the tap off as well. That’s why there’s more litter out there than anyone can really deal with. It never stops.
And while there are undoubtedly cases to be made about the state of public finances where waste collection and disposal are concerned, most litter ultimately has the same binary decision behind it. A littering choice, by every individual, as to whether or not they will do it.
Research in Scotland in 2007 found that 54% of respondents admitted to having ever dropped litter, with 46% admitting to dropping litter at least occasionally nowadays. But, in a study carried out in 2009….
‘…only 33% of those observed littering just moments before agreeing to be interviewed, admitted that they had littered within the previous 24 hours, while 28% told the interviewer that they had never littered in their life’
This suggests that people do feel a sense of shame about littering. Indeed, in a 2009 Keep Britain Tidy survey, 75% of people who admitted to littering said they felt guilty about it. As one of the drivers interviewed for the UVL research report said:
“I don’t think about it, I just do it, and then as soon as I’ve done it, I feel like I just want to stop the car and go and find it, because it just makes you feel really bad.”
When we clearly know it’s wrong, why do we do it?
Given the prevalence of litter worldwide, there’s no shortage of studies and reports trying to make sense of the motivations behind littering. Common conclusions reached through interviews and surveys are that many people know someone else will clear it up, or that it’s not a big deal because ‘it’s just one small item’.
Some people in the UVL survey placed a greater emphasis on having a clean car than having a clean roadside:
‘I don’t like rubbish in my car, so I’ll try and get it out at the first opportunity, even if that means throwing it out the window or something. I just can’t have it around me.’
The convenience of getting rid of it instantly seems to outweigh any negatives. In that sense, dropping litter is the path of least resistance.
A recent National Highways survey on littering found that ‘15% do so because they say they don’t have time to dispose of it properly’, ‘13% justify their actions by claiming “everyone does it”, and ‘22% say they do it out of habit’.
Studies also find that when you’ve littered once, it’s easier to do it again. It becomes habitual, and in turn you become desensitised to both the act and the consequences. But regarding the latter, in terms of fines and enforcement, people know there’s unlikely to be any consequences.
But litter shapes the way we perceive a place. An intriguing Dutch study in 2008 left 5 Euros, clearly visible in an envelope, hanging out of a letterbox. 13% of passers-by stole the envelope when the area was clean, whereas 25% did so when it was surrounded by litter.
The authors of that study suggested that ‘signs of social disorder (in this case, litter), dampened people’s impulse to act for the good of the community by eroding their sense of social obligation’.
Social norms can change depending on where you are, and humans tend to accept and comply with whatever social norms they are presented with. This is the basic idea that litter breeds litter. Worryingly, when Scottish local authorities are facing a £647m budget shortfall, any reduction in waste disposal services therefore risks having a disproportionately large impact on communities.
But while studies find, quite widely, that littering is less likely in areas kept clean and looked-after, or where there are more bins, this can only get you so far. That’s because it doesn’t matter how close or how empty a bin is, it doesn’t mean it will get used.
The first time I saw someone actually chuck a McD’s out their window was in the car park at Beecraigs Country Park. I went over, picked it up, knocked on the window and (half confused, half angry) cheerily said ‘hi, you dropped this’, as though I’d genuinely thought they’d done it without realising. I pointed at the two massive bins, with ‘LITTER’ etched on their fronts, just 10 metres away.
‘Keeping you in a job, pal’, came the reply.
Other rangers had told me about that infamous retort, but I thought it was a ranger myth. Surely nobody would ACTUALLY say that?!
I told him no, it wasn’t keeping me in a job. Instead I told him how, for every 2hrs of litter picking we had to do, it was one less school class we could host.
“The children! Won’t somebody think of the children!!”
But he wasn’t interested.
And just a few months ago, my better half was parked outside the shop in Braemar, when a local kid walked out. They immediately unwrapped an ice cream and discarded bits of the wrapper into the wind. The bin was a few short paces away. A few more steps, and a bit more wrapper got discarded.
He was so incensed he pulled up alongside and said to the kid ‘”What makes you think it’s ok to drop your litter on the street?”. The lad looked startled, said he’d dropped it by mistake and would go back and put it in the bin. The lad turned around and walked back towards the wrapper, then my other half drove off again and watched in his rear-view mirror, and when the lad thought he’d gone he just turned back around and carried on walking.
For a surprising number of people, it doesn’t matter how numerous or bleedin’ obvious your bin provision is, they’ll still drop stuff where they stand. And no profusion of bins is going to change that.
Change IS possible, of course. The American cyclist pondered whether there had been any public awareness campaigns here. Of course there have! Does anyone remember Flingin’s mingin’, from 2013?
Some campaigns even work. A campaign in Manchester, Dudley and Wiltshire called ‘Death Trap’, highlighted the harm that litter does to wildlife. It cited 2018 research that 2.9 million small mammals, such as mice, shrews, voles and hedgehogs, die in the UK as a direct result of littering. This information was put on roadsides where the traffic generally moved very slowly and the messages could be read. Littering fell by 26% on those roadsides, and there was a 34% decrease in discarded bottles and cans.
Taking a different tack, Fenland District Council in Cambridgeshire reduced litter by 58% by using a ‘positive reinforcement’ campaign, which simply communicated the fact that 8 out of 10 people don’t litter.
Regardless of whether littering is better or worse than it used to be, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s bad now. And this matters. It REALLY matters.
People consistently rate a clean and safe environment to live in as among their strongest concerns within their daily lives, and there are plenty of studies on how the visibility of litter adversely affects our behaviour and happiness.
But the cost of all this to the taxpayer is mindblowing. In the most recent ScotGov set of figures for littering, the direct cost to Scottish local authorities of litter (equipment, fleet costs and facilities etc) is estimated at £48m per year. Dedicated personnel costs alone are £32 million. Flytipping costs, incurred by 66,159 flytipping incidents, cost local authorities a further £12 million.
The annual cost of clearing litter in just one country park in Scotland is reported as £35,960. Most country parks are run by cash-strapped local authorities, so just imagine what else that could be spent on? If we drop litter, expecting the public purse to clear it up, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.
The indirect costs are greater still, ranging across mental health, crime, wildlife, wildfire damage, pest control, volunteer costs, direct injuries to people and livestock, road debris and accidents, punctures to bike and vehicle tyres, and adverse impacts on tourism and investment. Add all that together, and the Scotgov 2023 report estimates a total cost of £280 million per year.
Faced with all this bad news, it’s good to try and put a positive spin on this subject. To end on something uplifting. But what positive, uplifting point can you end on where litter is concerned?
Well, while it was frequently disheartening how much litterpicking we had to do in the country parks, I nonetheless found consolation in the knowledge that almost all of packaging and food etc that was brought into the country parks, or purchased within them, was deposited in (or near) a bin. Indeed, it took the whole of Saturday morning, every weekend, to empty the 30-something bins at Beecraigs.
That’s because most people DO care.
And that gives me hope that we CAN do better. I just don’t know why we aren’t.