These days, you can’t step two feet out of the door without tripping over a used bottle or standing on a cigarette butt – it’s a litter crisis.
Living in a digital age, however, we have the tools to spread the anti-litter message both verbally and through social media.
Manchester City Council is collecting reports on littering, fly tipping, spillages and eyesores via their homepage, alongside an interesting new website called FixMyStreet.com.
The charity, MySociety, developed this open website to bring together people across the country in the fight against litter.
For Mancunians, all they need to do is type in their postcode and report the issue, which is then sent to the appropriate people to deal with the matter.
According to the MySociety data, 98% of the UK’s council’s accept FixMyStreet’s reports, meaning everyone can do their part for cleaner streets.
Across the country, there are a small number of similar anti-litter campaigns, run by the local city councils, which can be accessed through the UK Government website.
Certain applications such as ‘Report It – Eastbourne’ encourage people to upload pictures of the problem, as well as descriptions and locations.
Most importantly, however, every reported problem is mapped, meaning certain areas can be monitored closely in a hope to identity the main perpetrators.
In fact, The Edinburgh Evening News is already committed to publishing the online picture of every person who was issued with a fine for littering in the city.
Several other websites such as the Our Haringey Application, Islington Now and The LitterGram Application, also encourage locals to report incidents and eye-witness reports.
So in future, if you ever catch a litterbug red-handed, you know what to do!
Residents can, of course, still report any cases of fly-tipping directly to Manchester City Council on their website.
Image courtesy of Mikey and Rachel Docherty, with thanks.
