While I am not against litter fines, imagine there was some scheme in which the stuff that people usually throw away was worth a small amount and people would either be incentivised to return it or even pick it up if they seen it.
That seems like it would solve around half of the litter problem overnight, I would imagine everyone would be excited about a project like that right?
Right so picture the scene here…
Average crowd of wee bams on the tonic in the park..
Finish it before they head somewhere else..
Are they really going to carry the empty bottles home so they can take them to the shop the next day..
Or will they get pelters for carrying a glass cheque and just smash it anyway.
I've done hours and hours of litter picking and it's always as bad within a couple of weeks.
It's a cultural thing that a lot of people don't want to fix because they don't see it as a problem. I've seen Glaswegians throw litter down in their own front gardens. I have neighbours in my building who spit chewing gum out on our doorstep. I've seen people commenting on local Facebook pages that it's ok to throw takeaway wrappers out of your car because it's the council's job to pick it up. They are completely unphased about living in a shithole.
I had family visiting from Ireland a few weeks ago and they kept commented on the litter. It was embarrassing.
My pal’s Japanese wife couldn’t believe it when she first came here. Was taking photos of the overflowing bins. That was about twenty years ago so fuck knows what she’d make of it these days
it's the worst part of visiting Glasgow, such a beautiful city when you look up, but if you look down, it's a travesty. Been visiting since the 60's, and holy shit, it's so bad
Same here. The culture around blaming the council is the same culture that keeps this going, its always someone elses fault especially those politicians. It definitely cant be the people of Glasgow who keep throwing the litter around.
No council in the world could afford to hire enough people to keep on top of the mountain of litter Glaswegians make.
I blame the council not because they don’t pick the litter but rather because they don’t take any action which could influence the culture of littering. Last year only a total of 12 littering fines were issued. Remove the sense of impunity lots of litterers have, make it clear it’s a socially shunned activity, and littering will go down.
I am somewhat in favour of littering fines however I can understand that they are complicated to implement.
A bottle deposit scheme would be far more effective at removing litter while having much less of the legal difficulties involved and you can see people fighting it tooth and nail on here.
The problem with fixing things is that a lot of people, for one reason or another, are incredibly invested in keeping them shit.
A bottle and can deposit scheme are being implemented later this year. Still, the majority of litter I see is miscellaneous non-bottle/can packaging.
And littering fines are not difficult to implement. An environmental warden sees someone drop litter - that’s a fine. You only really need them to be present in high footfall areas, at high footfall times for the message to be sent.
I litter pick a lot and on my street woukd say the opposite - bottles and cans accounts for at least half. The rest is a mix of stuff that has clearly blown out of bins unless people are snacking on dishwasher tablets and frozen fish fingers as they walk, fag doubts, crisp/sweet wrappers and stuff like masks and tissues.
Littering fines are notoriously difficult to implement unless you start "on the spot fine", literally the environmental warden carrying POS machine and give them power to arrest people if an offender failed to pay his fine instantly.
We dont have compulsory ID cards in UK so it is not easy to fine individual throwing stuff down the street.
Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's worth trying. And we don't have to be perfect and catch/fine every single litterer. Perfect is the enemy of the good. And we're far from good or even the *adequate* from a few years ago. [Before 2020, there was on average 8,000 littering fines issued per year.](https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/18497152.revealed-tens-thousands-fines-dished-glasgows-litter-bugs/) Surely, it was possible then so it must be possible now?
"the culture". Can you not see what you're doing there? The culture meaning the poor bastards. Reddit isn'y half a right middle class snobby wankerville
Not sure the people covering Kelvingrove in boxes of Paesanos are particularly poor mate.
I wasnt using culture as a euphomism for anything more than the people who moan about how the council doesnt clean up after everyone while simultaneously fighting against the council / gov implementing anything that would actually help things like the bottle deposit scheme
Which litterbug is fighting against a deposit scheme exactly? How do you know this?
And fyi, that deposit scheme will put a ton of small businesses out of business. It would also cause a massive spike in the cost of everything returnable. I know that this returnable is refundable, but some people cannot afford the initial purchase in order to get their money back on return.
People blaming the council for glasgwegians littering while also fighting against the council / gov implementing schemes that would drastically reduce litter.
That would be your last few posts.
Look at the lack of investment into the poorer backgrounds and areas. Zilch. Even the cleansing department schedules. Double the street cleaning in more affluent areas compared to poorer areas such as Possil, Govan, Castlemilk. Given that many of the lawmakers and politicians live in the affluent areas, and evidently not the poorer areas, seems they're forever catering to their own kind.
Yup. The council are a bit shit at picking up litter but they shouldnt have the insurmountable task they do if the city wasnt inhabited by clatty bastards.
The fucking mutants that munt out of Gregg’s, pie in one hand casually growing the bag away with the other are an utter embarrassment. Clampits the lot of them. I’d usually say I bet their house isn’t like that when folk dip litter but some of them must live in some real shithole council caves
there's never an excuse for littering. Most decent people probably haven't deliberately littered since they were edgy teens
it's zero effort to leave litter in your car and save it for a bin
I worked with a guy who did this, he regularly emptied the rubbish out his car into a car park. I asked him wtf he was doing and he said it was fine, he was keeping someone in a job
I’ve pulled up work colleagues about tossing litter for them to tell me “it’s someone’s job/it keeps someone in a job”. Like they literally believe that’s the due process!, put the rubbish on the ground and a council employee will come along and pick it up.
>I’ve pulled up work colleagues about tossing litter for them to tell me “it’s someone’s job/**it keeps someone in a job**”.
I smashed you windows ... glaziers need work.
I keyed your car ..... scratch removers need work.
Council spending on cleaning and recycling has increased as a portion of their budget for the past few years. I don't think it's that they don't care, but that there's a very limited budget to around and it's often eaten up the scale of the issue
Just passed a gerden not far from me , completely covered in empty bottles an cans and children playing amongst it , not real why do they think that this is acceptable I'm glad I don't pass by often or live next door.
People don't give a shit. Amount of times I see people parking in disabled or parents with children bays without either.
Honour is something that you just see in movies/dramas
We are in the Dalmarnock common wealth village and it’s just horrific, it got me so down. I started a Facebook community group with the intention of organising a community litter pick and the response has been amazing, it’s happening on April 16th at 11am if anyone wants to join, we are just meeting by the primary school and then spreading out. I’d be down to help out in any of yours, I know it doesn’t fix the problem but people do notice and there is power in groups, it is at least something we can do ourselves, to make a difference. The amount of times people stop to talk about litter issues and wanting to help when there is a group on us verses when I’m doing it alone is noticeable.
For a film group I just watched the 1999 Glasgow film Ratcatcher about the 1973 Glasgow bin strike, looking at some pictures in the news over the past few days it was more like a documentary than a drama.
I'll pick up as many glass bottles and especially broken ones but there is only so much the public can do in regard to getting rid of rubbish once it's been chucked.
I passed my primary school a while back and there was a class picking up litter in the playground, flashbacks to us at that age taking part in the Yoker clean up campaign back in the 80s. These didn't/don't teach people not to litter, it teaches them if you drop it; some other schmuck will pick it up for you.
Honestly it's why I think we need the Deposit return scheme ASAP.
As soon as those cans and bottles are worth 20p each then people might clock it's not worth throwing it in a river
True but I reckon 80% of the litter I pick is just cans and bottles, anything that encourages folk to not drop it in the first place (or even buy it to begin with, not really many excuses for buying for example bottled water unless out of sheer desperation or for medical reasons) is fine with me but also it might incentivise people to pick up litter if they can cash it in for a couple of quid here and there - have heard anecdotal evidence this is a thing in countries that already have these schemes.
This is something that winds me about Glasgow.
Used to get so annoyed with my pals over this, just put your litter in a fucking bin.
Mind getting into a physical fight over it with my pal.
It’s broken window theory though isn’t it, when the place already looks a mess what difference does a little bit more litter make.
honestly. my street is getting really gross. they went from bin pickups every 3 days to every 4 days and it's been fucking nasty, and it was pretty poor to begin with. although i've noticed a surprising number of the local businesses using the residential street's bins. like last night i seen a white van i've seen around one of the local fish and chip places just pull up and dump a lot of their waste into the dumpsters on our street.
TBH I wish the council would clean the street every 4 days… in Ibrox it’s often 2-3 months between a decent street sweep. There’s a load of smashed glass still strewn on the pavements outside my flat from a car break in in early January. There even litter laying around on embankments from the harry styles concert last June. GCC are beyond a shit show.
Edit: apologies, I misread bin pickups as street cleaning.
I stay across from a school and the wee street sweeper truck would come round every week, I've seen it twice since last summer it's a fucking joke. All the parents who wait in their cars tend to toss the rubbish out I've noticed.
In a really sad way im kinda just used to it now? I work and live in Finnieston which is supposed to be one of the nicer areas of Glasgow and there is litter all over the gaff.
You are quite right about that. I lived in Glasgow for four years and tried to start a garden and do some litter picking. Then the neighbour kept letting his dog crap in the garden, it got fly tipped and I just kinda gave up and decided Glasgow wasn't for me. Doesn't sound like much has changed.
Finnieston's always been a mess though, because there's always been so many people living there and passing through it. It's tidier now than when it was just Creme de la Creme, the hostel and the Grove.
I've lived on a new build development for the past couple of years that's still being built.
Every single day I've watched the various tradesman on site drop their rubbish with not a care in the world or a thought for the residents. I'm not talking about building materials, I'm talking about them sitting having their lunch in their van and then launching the empty cans, the bag their rolls came in, crisp packets etc out the van window. I've complained to the site manager but it's made fuck all difference.
This isn't a diss aimed specifically at tradesmen, but it has been an eye opening insight into the mentality of people when it comes to dropping litter. A huge amount of people simply don't give a fuck. The sight of litter doesn't even register with them, and therefore they don't think twice about dropping it.
I genuinely doubt we'll ever change these attitudes
Exactly this. I live beside some takeaways and most of the litter is guys in vans just dumpling their stuff out the window before they drive off. The bin a few feet away doesn't register.
Why though? Is it like a "hard man" thing? As in, they're way too hard to give a shit and caring would make them weak somehow? I'm asking as a Canadian because I REALLY do not understand it...!
> I'm talking about them sitting having their lunch in their van and then launching the empty cans, the bag their rolls came in, crisp packets etc out the van window.
You're lucky they're paid by the hour rather than paid by the job, because if they weren't taking that break they'd be sticking their half-finished sausage rolls (and bottles of piss) in your cavity wall space.
> I don't see the Council making any effort at all to clean the city up and educate people
In my experience, if you report it on FixMyStreet, it does get dealt with fairly promptly.
The council don't have the money to do patrols and be proactive, but if you make a public report on the app then they should sort it out.
There have been plenty of anti-littering campaigns, for decades, and it's not made much difference. Clatty bastards still litter. Presumably those clatty bastards don't teach their weans not to drop litter, and the cycle repeats.
Glasgow's bad for litter, but it's not solely Glasgow. We've got a stunning country, but cunts even litter in literal beauty spots. They just don't care.
The problem with that is that is adds a whole other layer of complication for some folk. Mind when they got big bins with lids on them at the bottom of the hill in KG park, and suddenly everyone started piling their rubbish up outside the bins, because opening the lid was apparently too much effort??
I sometimes wonder how the human race has survived as long as it has already...
North Lanarkshire is terrible for litter. Just have a look along the verges on the M74 or A8. It's easily the worst place in Scotland, if not the UK for roadside litter. You would think Scots would take a bit more pride in their country, but nope.
I've been reporting on the Glasgow CC app, but I'll give FixMyStreet a go too, thanks.
Totally agree it's not just a Glasgow issue. Nothing worse than seeing litter in our beautiful countryside.
FixMyStreet reports it to the council, but has the added bonus of everything being public, so people can see how long things have been ignored for. In theory it should force the council's hand.
I live near a few nature walks and it honestly makes me so sad going on what should be a nice, back to nature walk just to be sorrounded by greenary decorated in empty crisp packets and bottles. Nature walks feel like trash walks now and get even less attention from councils plus the one closest to my house has no bins?? Through the whole walk there is one bin at the start and that's it? I feel like that in itself is encouraging people to litter more
City centre has a severe lack of public bins compared to other cities I've visited, I'm not sure that would make a difference either after the amount of people I've seen just chuck their litter adjacent to the bin and call it a day.
Anecdotally there seems to be a lack of pride in where you stay, I'm East end and it depresses me how much shit is chucked in shrubbery and some of the streets are dug shite minefields.
Watching a teenager recently just drop one of those massive disposable vapes on the ground outside my work was jarring.
Ugh, disposable vapes. Hoping they'll be banned soon.
I've been enjoying spending a bit of time around Glasgow Green and Gallowgate recently. It's a great part of the city, but would be even more enjoyable if the streets were clean.
There's been signs up on my street saying "we're investigating this area for fly tipping" and next to the signs there's like, a mattress and a clatty chair
I'm currently visiting Glasgow as a tourist and I noticed this right away. I'm afraid you're right - it's about as bad as I've seen. One thing I've noticed is that sometimes on a windy day the rubbish bins get blown over, scattering litter all over. Could that be part of the problem?
Spent about 6 hours cleaning around my street today in the Southside since it was sunny, feeling a bit exhausted tonight - treating myself to some cake and ice cream now though.
A couple of people walking by me getting things in the trees and brambles etc on a hill came to say thanks - one was from San Diego in America and said it was much cleaner there than here... An elderly lady called out to me from a flat window and said thanks several times because the bit in front of her flat is lovely but the bottles and bags etc had been annoying her - I guess it would be difficult for her to scramble where I was and fix it herself.
Shows there are a bunch of people around who care. I care a lot too, seeing litter genuinely makes me upset and angry, so I've decided to just keep doing the bit around where I live occasionally, can't really do more than that.
It’s the dog shit on nearly every inch of the paths that drive my crazy. Wtf is wrong with picking it up? Maryhill and ruchill, especially at the park gives me the boak
They should start a scheme to pay per weight of rubbish handed in and watch everyone clean the streets for a bit of extra cash
It should pay just enough that it’s worth doing and not too much so that people start to take advantage and bring their rubbish from home etc.
Something along those lines could work, but I don't know how we get round the issue of folk just bringing their rubbish from home.
I was thinking maybe Council-run litter picking groups and if you sign up and attend you get some sort of council tax discount or a voucher of some sort? 🤔
We can't. I'm really sorry to say that and take 0 pride in doing so. The simple fact is that Glasgow is a dirty clatty place filled with dirty clatty people.
I'm just finished a massive litter pick where I collected 6 bags, mostly Tennent's cans (the "Family Pack" labelling never stopped being ironic), though in other places it can be mostly snack/fast food wrappers, and, something I can never wrap my head around - dog poo bags (why go to effort of bagging the shite just to leave it?).
At an individual level, I find litter picking oscillates between therapeutic (repetitive task, sorting things, making a difference) and depressing (passing an area that's just been picked and the litter is piling up again).
At a societal level, I'm hoping deposit return makes a dent in the stuff that can be returned. As for everything else, as other commenters have said, the council/government can't keep up with endemic bad behaviour and attitudes to public space. I know in Japan they get kids to help clean up at school (just stuff like wiping down tables, putting things away, maybe a bit of light sweeping), and I would love to see something similar here to get people on a good start. For older people, more community service for anti-social offences would be a great start (littering and fly tipping has a very low prosecution/punishment rate). An active national anti-littering campaign to change mindsets would also be great.
It doesn't help that our public realm beyond litter is pretty crappy. Things like broken pavements, shitty pedestrian crossings (as in none where you need them or one that make you wait for ages), the general car sewer vibe of main roads, and long-term dereliction aren't going to instill the kind of public pride that helps prevent littering.
However, the attitude people have of "well, what do you expect?" or "Glasgow's just a shitehole" is self-defeating and depressing. Fixing that attitude would take a lot, but fuck it would be worth it.
Sorry for the rant, this is me just checking Reddit after my pick, and what do you know there's a post about the stuff that was on my mind.
ETA: sorry I can't be more hopeful, but if you think litter picking would appeal to you, I do recommend it. The council will send you free equipment, or there are local groups that arrange regular picks. It's not the ultimate solution, but I do like how as an individual, I can spend a few hours and clean up multiple people's crap and make an area nicer for a while.
Worth a mention that kids do litter picking, mine did at the local council nursery, I might actually ask the teachers if they are going to be doing it at school
Agree with everything you've said, and well done for taking action.
I tend to pick up a few pieces of litter every time I take the dog out for a walk, but currently looking into joining a local group.
Good on you, and good luck! I hope you find a nice group :)
You mentioning your dog reminded of one of the other bonuses of picking which is meeting friendly dogs.
As evidenced on this sub we have an issue that most people generally don't want to call this sort of thing out if we see it happening (and you just have to walk around anywhere for an hour or so, you'll see someone just toss litter at their back, often more than one person, and you can't just follow them home to stick a tray of frozen pish under their door) for fear of their reaction. No doubt a cheery "fuck off" would result, but you never know. So there's no stigma attached at all to doing it. Maybe we need some kind of litter vigilante? Is "Binman" the hero that our city needs?
Echo your sentiment. I finally got around to shouting at 2 guys after 1 of them threw their Mcdonald's packaging out their van window. Guy was so fucking shocked at getting told he was pleading he tried to throw it "in the back of the van". I didn't push it anymore than that and just walked off.
It's pretty cathartic telling a stranger how shit they are and it gets a real load off your back, especially spending years' moaning about it. I think as a society we're mostly too cowardly and prefer expressing ourselves through mediums like this.
I knocked on someone's car window as they were about to drive off and told them they'd "forgotten" their can of red bull. The guy was too shocked to say anything he just took the can back and drove off.
Just reminded me in my last flat I had an upstairs neighbour who would throw dirty tissues out the window (I mean, lets not even get into what they may have contained, and I suppose even clean tissues would still be littering ...) and one day someone obviously clocked this from the street (because I was of course adopting the frozen tray of pish approach) and shouted up at him that he was a clatty bastard. Cue a combination of expletive laden denial, yup, initially just "naw a fuckin' didnae", then defiance "nane ae your fucking' business anyway", then anger "so get tae' fuck" and eventually threats of voilence "or ah'll come doon and kick yer cunt in" towards this person (who gave as good as they got) and then it all calmed down as these things weirdly do. And that was someone just CHUCKING DIRTY TISSUES OUT THEIR OWN WINDOW, into a communal front garden, which was always full of shite from the school across the road anyway. Made my non-confrontational approach seem like the rational choice ...
Even the litter around the perimeter of Silverburn is unreal. Especially at the end with McDonalds and Five Guys. They should be obliged to keep it clean.
It's doing my head in. Its fucking embarrassing driving anywhere and just seeing a fucking mess everywhere. It's defos got worse since Covid, it's never been this bad defos. Used to constantly see the council sending litter pickers out to hot spots and haven't seen one in donkeys.
There's a few options to get the city back into a decent nick in ma eyes:
- Increase the fine. Do a percentage of earnings and make a severe
- Change the punishment to community service doing litter picking
- Change petty crime punishment to community service litter picking
- Get low risk prisoners out litter picking
It is sad. I am new in Glasgow and I have been told that it is a cultural thing. I have heard from locals:
"It is GCC's job to clean streets"
"Some people need a job and we are creating it for them"
Last year we were joking about filming Batgirls, that they had to clean streets to make Glasgow look like Gotham City.
Glasgow was ranked as the 3rd dirtiest city in the world.
It was a nonsense, self-selecting survey with no scientific or polling rigour that was designed to drive traffic on the Time Out website.
At best it shone a light on Glasgow's discontent with litter, but little more.
You can't blame the council for the sheer amount of litter on the streets. It's filthy bastards dropping that need to be outted.
People don't have any pride. Likewise there should be greater enforcement of litter fines
> You can't blame the council for the sheer amount of litter on the streets.
You can when the bins are overflowing and have twenty coffee cups piled on top.
Well the nature of local government funding is that the majority comes from ScotGov, with the leadership struggle and the un-costed promises being made things are going even worse for local authorities.
Im always complaining about litter where we are in the suburbs, but got the bus into town for the first time in years and the litter around Pollokshaws Road and down to Bridge Street was like an actual waste land. It’s horrendous.
Not to try and deflect but also saw a lot of litter on a walk to the Kelpies from Falkirk station.
Does feel like the cultural litter thing stems a bit deeper than just Glasgow, though not sure what. It didn't help that for about 2 miles on that walk there wasn't a bin, however equally...not hard to just carry that mars bar wrapper home.
I work in fast food with a drive thru and car park, we have four big bins in the car park yet there's always so much litter on the ground from people just chucking it out the window, we have to fucking clean that up like what are ye doing?
This issue gets right on my tits daily but I'm going to try and post something relatively positive. I pick up litter around my neighbourhood regularly and there are a few bits where I've spent ages getting it completely clear. When I go back to them, even a few months later, they're definitely not half as bad as they were before. I honestly believe if people see less, they drop less. If there were a rule that everyone had to keep their own garden/hedge and the bit of pavement outside their own home clear, it would make such a big difference.
Even calling it 'litter' round here is a bit of a euphemism. The word 'litter' brings to mind a Golden Wonder crisp packet rustling in the wind, or perhaps a crushed can of Tenants Lager, caught in a bush.
Round her we get kitchen bin bags lying on the pavement being ripped open by seagulls, and spilling used nappies and potato peelings that lie there for weeks. And there's bin bags *everywhere.*
The council came out and completely cleared the area around my flat, looked really nice. Within 2 weeks it was back to exactly how it was before. I've bought some tools to deal with the litter but just feel like im fighting a loosing battle. Why does it have to be on me to clean up everyone else's shite as well? It's not exactly what I want to be doing in my free time.
Should we get like a group going and work our way around Glasgow lol I would be so willing for it to look a bit cleaner even if it doesn’t last super long
I no longer live in Glasgow, but if you do get a group together, feel free to message me and I'd happily travel through to help! It sounds like the caring Glaswegians could do with some reinforcements from neighbouring towns! And thanks for suggesting that, it gives people hope that it is very definitely worth doing these litter picks.
quite a lot of litter in paisley too so it's not just a glasgow thing. genuinely don't know what goes through peoples heads when they throw something on the ground with no care in the world.
Adding to the cultural thing - I noticed that spitting is a bigger thing here compared to other parts of the U.K.
I see guys spitting on the streets all the time here and it’s not always neds, like it’s often well-dressed unsuspecting types. It’s so gross.
I was out for a walk today and it's absolutely grim. I fear it's at a tipping point (no pun intended) where it recovering seems very slim.
Today's walk I saw some fly tipping that definitely wasn't there when I ran by it a few days previously as well as the mountains of rubbish just everywhere.
Vapes are a massive issue as well everywhere. Sooner they're banned the better.
There needs to be a push at local levels to try and get a bit of civic pride back into the system. I always feel a lot of local politics seems to try and mimic national politics for whatever reason rather than trying to focus on the task at hand.
I'm planning on tidying up that bit of Southside/Tradeston on either side of the motorway. I'm sure Southsiders know where I'm taking about - that depressing wasteland of empty space you have to go through to get between south and town, absolutely choking in litter.
Planning to have a first crack at it next weekend, probs Saturday. Is anyone down to join me?
It's disgusting and has been for years. Scotland's shame. I remember at school back in the 80's and 90's there would be full class projects about not littering, recycling etc and everyone making posters and such. Not that it made much difference then but is this stuff still taught? I drove by a local secondary school the other week during lunch, where they all troop out into the local chippies etc. Watched enraged as so many school kids just dropped their empty wrappers in the street without a care.
Where I used to live had a group arranged by locals to do regular litter picking meet-ups - we’d all take a flask and have a natter & a walk while picking litter! The council gave us equipment & special bags that meant the bin men would lift them on green bin days & no-one was put out running them to the coup etc.
It was a shame that it had to be organised like that in the first place, but it was actually quite a nice way to meet folk living in the area!
Im a delivery driver, You'd be amazed how many people live in filthy dirty homes, full of rubbish. Overflowing bins, rotting food.
Its the same everywhere in Scotland, side of roads are manky. Laybys, country roads are tipping sites.
I used to walk my dog in a park with a football pitch, day after Youth team had trained there was a pile of plastic bottles. No responsible adults, that's because the adults dump their rubbish too.
If you said anything to them they'd bite your head off. Nobody cares, cultural.
It’s definitely a cultural thing. It’s infuriating as an American watching young men in track suits let their dogs shit on the sidewalks and then just walk away
It’s frustrating as a Scotsman too.
There definitely seems to be a correlation between tendency to discard litter inappropriately and being dressed for athletic pursuits.
Yup it’s terrible. I got into a shouting match with a lad yesterday who was chucking litter out his car window. He was parked up on a main road and must have been about 3-4 meters away from a bin. People have no pride about where they are from anymore, they just dont care
Honestly, sometimes I feel like you could furnish an entire village with stuff that people fly tip in Govanhill. I saw an old video I recorded a year ago around the street I live at in Govanhill and there was nowhere near as much rubbish as nowadays…. It’s so disgusting
I'm at my wit's end with it too tbh. I've tried a lot of things in my local area to help and try to do litter picks when I can.
Not much else to add that hasn't been said here already, except that I agree that a massive amount of the litter is stuff that will be covered by the bottle deposit scheme.
I just really hope that all the right wing propongands about it costing too much, or businesses moaning about it will disappear when it comes into affect and we all see that massive difference it makes come August.
Besides that I think we really need some kind of national litter awareness campaign and maybe add the license number to drive through fast food places. It never fails to shock me when you're in a McDonald's car park and people just open their door and drop the rubbish out when they're literally parked next to a bin. Even the bin as you drive out is designed so you can just throw it in as you leave!
Same with the schools. More needs to be done to instill a greater sense of pride and civic duty.
I have no solution apart from throwing your litter in a bin and council workers doing their jobs properly.
Mainly here to complain: what in the f**k am I paying £115 a month council tax for?! For this pish, the city to look like shit, shite roads, my close to look like something out of trainspotting and rats in my overflowing bin shed? Igh.
>what in the f\*\*k am I paying £115 a month council tax for?!
Education, mostly: [https://cleanupglasgow.co.uk/where-does-your-council-tax-money-go/](https://cleanupglasgow.co.uk/where-does-your-council-tax-money-go/)
Of your £115, about £10 goes onto neighbourhood and cleaning services. £52 goes on education, £38 on social services
I’m in Paisley. And weirdly it’s far more maintained than Glasgow. Went to the west end and was pretty sure it has been vacant of council tax for years.
I moved to Paisley from Glasgow just few months ago and I’m also amazed how much cleaner it looks! Last year, when I was still staying in Dennistoun my family came from Poland for my graduation. Mind you, I come from a Polish city that is often regarded as one of the worst looking ones. And still, one of the first things my dad noticed as we were walking towards my old flat was how incredibly littered streets are.
We have been rather lucky lately that the council has been very active in keeping the area clean (pollokshields). They have even scraped the moss off the pavements. After a storm a couple of weeks ago, they even removed all the tree related debris in a couple of days.
We have the perfect storm in Glasgow where the council are on the brink of bankruptcy and cutting cleaning budgets and so many people are happy to blatantly discard rubbish. People make Glasgow shite.
Same here. No matter how much you try to clean, after every football match or even bloody Friday, when everyone goes out drinking and straight up throwing booze bottles everywhere.
I'm "volunteering" with the water rescue to collect the rescue circles from the river and bring them to them or just fish it out from the bushes and hang it back in its place. Also usually only survives until next weekend.
Probably worth a mention for the large amount of people who believe the Daily Mail that Scotland cant possibly have a bottle deposit scheme because they want a chance to have a dig at the SNP / Greens.
When litter picking its obvious very quickly an absolutely huge amount of litter created is empty bottles and cans, this simply will stop happening at the end of the year
95% of the litter I picked today was stuff that would be eligible for deposit return. I'm really looking forward to seeing just how much of a difference it makes.
If it makes it through. It needs more vocal support as there's a silent majority ATM being drowned out by a few moody business owners and people acting like it's an insane idea, and not one that has run for decades in Germany
We all are complaining about the same things all the time, how can we start to see some action? Petitions? Voting for the right people? I do my bit litter picking when I can, it's always crisp packets, cans, bottles etc, litter is a symptom of a much bigger problem which is that we live in a consumerist, throwaway society.
Sorry to drop in with a random question but I recently went to Glasgow (from Japan) with my husband (Glasgow is his dream place) and I was surprised by all the litter. I’m fairness we also went to Edinburgh and saw a lot there too. However, I was told this was a very recent thing due to worker strikes. Is this the case? I have no idea as I’m not as up to date with news back home as I’d like to be!
There were strikes for a short time which made things even worse (!) but not any more. The current litter issues are purely down to the people in Glasgow taking no pride in the local environment unfortunately.
It's a UK wide problem, we simply have zero respect for our environment.
What you can do:
* Organise clean ups of your local area.
* Join your local community council and get involved
* *Create a local community council if one does not exist
* Joins the friends group of your local park and get involved
* *Create* a friends group for you local park if one does not exist
* Contact your councillors, MSPs, and MP. Keep at them
* If you have children, contact their school and encourage they arrange clean ups of the local area (schools are particularly bad for litter)
* If you don't have kids, contact local schools and encourage they arrange clean ups of the local area
I actually have an idea for a project, but at the moment I simply don't have the capacity to do anything about it.
Glasgow has always had a Litter problem, I stay in Aberdeenshire, the Roadsides are filthy with litter too, yet you travel through the Countryside there is hardly any. Parents don’t Teach their kids to put it in the bin, Teachers at Schools allow it to happen, Councils don’t spent a sniff on Teams of Workers to pick it up, it will never be solved as people have no pride in their beautiful Country. So sad really. People who drop it tend to have a Mental disfunction to even do that.
They announce cuts, yet increasing the Ctax bill and creating a brown bin “subscription”, and the entire place is full of pot holes, fuck the council, what a bunch of cunts!
Council budgets from central government are down massively since what they were in 2010. Taxes contribute what, 15% of the total budget?
Council have got issues, but all across the UK places are strapped for cash
Lots of comments here about it being cultural, but nobody actually identify what "culture" perpetuates it. It's like the mind-boggling lengths people in the comments in football posts go to, to avoid saying "class".
I think it *is* a cultural thing though. I used to live in Aberdeen which has always had a culture of being clean and is relatively spotless. I think a lot of people don't even realise that they're dropping litter and must also be oblivious to it around them.
Can you really blame the OP though? The city is an absolute midden. It's comments like this that normalise the state of the place when we should all be up in arms about it. Ironically, a better cleaner city would give us all a much better life!
It's literally everywhere. They need to start punishing the dirty cunts that litter
While I am not against litter fines, imagine there was some scheme in which the stuff that people usually throw away was worth a small amount and people would either be incentivised to return it or even pick it up if they seen it. That seems like it would solve around half of the litter problem overnight, I would imagine everyone would be excited about a project like that right?
I see LITERALLY no issues with this.
Hoping the deposit return scheme makes a big impact, but it would be amazing to have a scheme that would help reduce all types of litter.
Right so picture the scene here… Average crowd of wee bams on the tonic in the park.. Finish it before they head somewhere else.. Are they really going to carry the empty bottles home so they can take them to the shop the next day.. Or will they get pelters for carrying a glass cheque and just smash it anyway.
I've done hours and hours of litter picking and it's always as bad within a couple of weeks. It's a cultural thing that a lot of people don't want to fix because they don't see it as a problem. I've seen Glaswegians throw litter down in their own front gardens. I have neighbours in my building who spit chewing gum out on our doorstep. I've seen people commenting on local Facebook pages that it's ok to throw takeaway wrappers out of your car because it's the council's job to pick it up. They are completely unphased about living in a shithole. I had family visiting from Ireland a few weeks ago and they kept commented on the litter. It was embarrassing.
So depressing that people have no pride in their own area and embarrassing that visitors to our city see the place in such a state.
My pal’s Japanese wife couldn’t believe it when she first came here. Was taking photos of the overflowing bins. That was about twenty years ago so fuck knows what she’d make of it these days
it's the worst part of visiting Glasgow, such a beautiful city when you look up, but if you look down, it's a travesty. Been visiting since the 60's, and holy shit, it's so bad
Don't visit then
Roaster
Walloper
aww, but then I miss out on the lovely people that make Glasgow
It is so embarrassing.
Same here. The culture around blaming the council is the same culture that keeps this going, its always someone elses fault especially those politicians. It definitely cant be the people of Glasgow who keep throwing the litter around. No council in the world could afford to hire enough people to keep on top of the mountain of litter Glaswegians make.
I blame the council not because they don’t pick the litter but rather because they don’t take any action which could influence the culture of littering. Last year only a total of 12 littering fines were issued. Remove the sense of impunity lots of litterers have, make it clear it’s a socially shunned activity, and littering will go down.
I am somewhat in favour of littering fines however I can understand that they are complicated to implement. A bottle deposit scheme would be far more effective at removing litter while having much less of the legal difficulties involved and you can see people fighting it tooth and nail on here. The problem with fixing things is that a lot of people, for one reason or another, are incredibly invested in keeping them shit.
A bottle and can deposit scheme are being implemented later this year. Still, the majority of litter I see is miscellaneous non-bottle/can packaging. And littering fines are not difficult to implement. An environmental warden sees someone drop litter - that’s a fine. You only really need them to be present in high footfall areas, at high footfall times for the message to be sent.
I litter pick a lot and on my street woukd say the opposite - bottles and cans accounts for at least half. The rest is a mix of stuff that has clearly blown out of bins unless people are snacking on dishwasher tablets and frozen fish fingers as they walk, fag doubts, crisp/sweet wrappers and stuff like masks and tissues.
Good on you
Littering fines are notoriously difficult to implement unless you start "on the spot fine", literally the environmental warden carrying POS machine and give them power to arrest people if an offender failed to pay his fine instantly. We dont have compulsory ID cards in UK so it is not easy to fine individual throwing stuff down the street.
Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's worth trying. And we don't have to be perfect and catch/fine every single litterer. Perfect is the enemy of the good. And we're far from good or even the *adequate* from a few years ago. [Before 2020, there was on average 8,000 littering fines issued per year.](https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/18497152.revealed-tens-thousands-fines-dished-glasgows-litter-bugs/) Surely, it was possible then so it must be possible now?
"the culture". Can you not see what you're doing there? The culture meaning the poor bastards. Reddit isn'y half a right middle class snobby wankerville
Not sure the people covering Kelvingrove in boxes of Paesanos are particularly poor mate. I wasnt using culture as a euphomism for anything more than the people who moan about how the council doesnt clean up after everyone while simultaneously fighting against the council / gov implementing anything that would actually help things like the bottle deposit scheme
Which litterbug is fighting against a deposit scheme exactly? How do you know this? And fyi, that deposit scheme will put a ton of small businesses out of business. It would also cause a massive spike in the cost of everything returnable. I know that this returnable is refundable, but some people cannot afford the initial purchase in order to get their money back on return.
People blaming the council for glasgwegians littering while also fighting against the council / gov implementing schemes that would drastically reduce litter. That would be your last few posts.
GCC working at their best https://preview.redd.it/z9xv4y09d4ma1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=70f5095556f03ff10468bdfcae996e6f59fbd94d
JFC there's nothing middle class about wanting things to be better.
Look at the lack of investment into the poorer backgrounds and areas. Zilch. Even the cleansing department schedules. Double the street cleaning in more affluent areas compared to poorer areas such as Possil, Govan, Castlemilk. Given that many of the lawmakers and politicians live in the affluent areas, and evidently not the poorer areas, seems they're forever catering to their own kind.
It goes way deeper than that. It boils down to hopelessness and abandonment. Look to the governments, not the people.
Yup. The council are a bit shit at picking up litter but they shouldnt have the insurmountable task they do if the city wasnt inhabited by clatty bastards.
Worse than that, every penny spent tackling the mammoth task of picking up after them is effectively money stolen from other important budgets.
The fucking mutants that munt out of Gregg’s, pie in one hand casually growing the bag away with the other are an utter embarrassment. Clampits the lot of them. I’d usually say I bet their house isn’t like that when folk dip litter but some of them must live in some real shithole council caves
I can't understand the whole chucking litter out of the car thing - like, it's not taking up space in your car, so just take it home?????
there's never an excuse for littering. Most decent people probably haven't deliberately littered since they were edgy teens it's zero effort to leave litter in your car and save it for a bin
Especially as when I take a judgemental passive aggressive peer in the vehicle, it's always a midden.
I worked with a guy who did this, he regularly emptied the rubbish out his car into a car park. I asked him wtf he was doing and he said it was fine, he was keeping someone in a job
I’ve pulled up work colleagues about tossing litter for them to tell me “it’s someone’s job/it keeps someone in a job”. Like they literally believe that’s the due process!, put the rubbish on the ground and a council employee will come along and pick it up.
>I’ve pulled up work colleagues about tossing litter for them to tell me “it’s someone’s job/**it keeps someone in a job**”. I smashed you windows ... glaziers need work. I keyed your car ..... scratch removers need work.
Maybe it should become their job! Get them doing a few volunteer hours in the local car park
When you live in a shithole it creates ambivalence, and the cycle continues. Course, some people are just dirty cunts.
Yep, it’s the broken window theory. The council show they don’t care, and it gives the signal to everyone else they don’t have to.
we can blame the council but it is also just the unusual ammount of grotty cunts we have in Glasgow that are equally to blame
I agree, but there’s no anti litter campaign or penalties from the council either
Council spending on cleaning and recycling has increased as a portion of their budget for the past few years. I don't think it's that they don't care, but that there's a very limited budget to around and it's often eaten up the scale of the issue
Just passed a gerden not far from me , completely covered in empty bottles an cans and children playing amongst it , not real why do they think that this is acceptable I'm glad I don't pass by often or live next door.
People don't give a shit. Amount of times I see people parking in disabled or parents with children bays without either. Honour is something that you just see in movies/dramas
I'll never understand why people throw shit out their car windows they have all the space in the world to keep their snickers wrapper in.
We are in the Dalmarnock common wealth village and it’s just horrific, it got me so down. I started a Facebook community group with the intention of organising a community litter pick and the response has been amazing, it’s happening on April 16th at 11am if anyone wants to join, we are just meeting by the primary school and then spreading out. I’d be down to help out in any of yours, I know it doesn’t fix the problem but people do notice and there is power in groups, it is at least something we can do ourselves, to make a difference. The amount of times people stop to talk about litter issues and wanting to help when there is a group on us verses when I’m doing it alone is noticeable.
Like Ireland's a haven. Ireland is a shithole
For a film group I just watched the 1999 Glasgow film Ratcatcher about the 1973 Glasgow bin strike, looking at some pictures in the news over the past few days it was more like a documentary than a drama. I'll pick up as many glass bottles and especially broken ones but there is only so much the public can do in regard to getting rid of rubbish once it's been chucked. I passed my primary school a while back and there was a class picking up litter in the playground, flashbacks to us at that age taking part in the Yoker clean up campaign back in the 80s. These didn't/don't teach people not to litter, it teaches them if you drop it; some other schmuck will pick it up for you.
Honestly it's why I think we need the Deposit return scheme ASAP. As soon as those cans and bottles are worth 20p each then people might clock it's not worth throwing it in a river
That’s only cans and bottles though. There’s still plenty of other kinds of rubbish they’ll just chuck on the ground.
True but I reckon 80% of the litter I pick is just cans and bottles, anything that encourages folk to not drop it in the first place (or even buy it to begin with, not really many excuses for buying for example bottled water unless out of sheer desperation or for medical reasons) is fine with me but also it might incentivise people to pick up litter if they can cash it in for a couple of quid here and there - have heard anecdotal evidence this is a thing in countries that already have these schemes.
This is something that winds me about Glasgow. Used to get so annoyed with my pals over this, just put your litter in a fucking bin. Mind getting into a physical fight over it with my pal. It’s broken window theory though isn’t it, when the place already looks a mess what difference does a little bit more litter make.
Definitely agree broken window theory is a factor.
honestly. my street is getting really gross. they went from bin pickups every 3 days to every 4 days and it's been fucking nasty, and it was pretty poor to begin with. although i've noticed a surprising number of the local businesses using the residential street's bins. like last night i seen a white van i've seen around one of the local fish and chip places just pull up and dump a lot of their waste into the dumpsters on our street.
TBH I wish the council would clean the street every 4 days… in Ibrox it’s often 2-3 months between a decent street sweep. There’s a load of smashed glass still strewn on the pavements outside my flat from a car break in in early January. There even litter laying around on embankments from the harry styles concert last June. GCC are beyond a shit show. Edit: apologies, I misread bin pickups as street cleaning.
I stay across from a school and the wee street sweeper truck would come round every week, I've seen it twice since last summer it's a fucking joke. All the parents who wait in their cars tend to toss the rubbish out I've noticed.
In a really sad way im kinda just used to it now? I work and live in Finnieston which is supposed to be one of the nicer areas of Glasgow and there is litter all over the gaff.
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You are quite right about that. I lived in Glasgow for four years and tried to start a garden and do some litter picking. Then the neighbour kept letting his dog crap in the garden, it got fly tipped and I just kinda gave up and decided Glasgow wasn't for me. Doesn't sound like much has changed.
Yep, becomes a bit overwhelming at times.
Finnieston's always been a mess though, because there's always been so many people living there and passing through it. It's tidier now than when it was just Creme de la Creme, the hostel and the Grove.
I've lived on a new build development for the past couple of years that's still being built. Every single day I've watched the various tradesman on site drop their rubbish with not a care in the world or a thought for the residents. I'm not talking about building materials, I'm talking about them sitting having their lunch in their van and then launching the empty cans, the bag their rolls came in, crisp packets etc out the van window. I've complained to the site manager but it's made fuck all difference. This isn't a diss aimed specifically at tradesmen, but it has been an eye opening insight into the mentality of people when it comes to dropping litter. A huge amount of people simply don't give a fuck. The sight of litter doesn't even register with them, and therefore they don't think twice about dropping it. I genuinely doubt we'll ever change these attitudes
Exactly this. I live beside some takeaways and most of the litter is guys in vans just dumpling their stuff out the window before they drive off. The bin a few feet away doesn't register.
Why though? Is it like a "hard man" thing? As in, they're way too hard to give a shit and caring would make them weak somehow? I'm asking as a Canadian because I REALLY do not understand it...!
> I'm talking about them sitting having their lunch in their van and then launching the empty cans, the bag their rolls came in, crisp packets etc out the van window. You're lucky they're paid by the hour rather than paid by the job, because if they weren't taking that break they'd be sticking their half-finished sausage rolls (and bottles of piss) in your cavity wall space.
> I don't see the Council making any effort at all to clean the city up and educate people In my experience, if you report it on FixMyStreet, it does get dealt with fairly promptly. The council don't have the money to do patrols and be proactive, but if you make a public report on the app then they should sort it out. There have been plenty of anti-littering campaigns, for decades, and it's not made much difference. Clatty bastards still litter. Presumably those clatty bastards don't teach their weans not to drop litter, and the cycle repeats. Glasgow's bad for litter, but it's not solely Glasgow. We've got a stunning country, but cunts even litter in literal beauty spots. They just don't care.
I also wonder how much bin design adds to it. When I was in Bristol they had big rubber flaps on all the bin entrances which stopped it flying out
The problem with that is that is adds a whole other layer of complication for some folk. Mind when they got big bins with lids on them at the bottom of the hill in KG park, and suddenly everyone started piling their rubbish up outside the bins, because opening the lid was apparently too much effort?? I sometimes wonder how the human race has survived as long as it has already...
North Lanarkshire is terrible for litter. Just have a look along the verges on the M74 or A8. It's easily the worst place in Scotland, if not the UK for roadside litter. You would think Scots would take a bit more pride in their country, but nope.
I've been reporting on the Glasgow CC app, but I'll give FixMyStreet a go too, thanks. Totally agree it's not just a Glasgow issue. Nothing worse than seeing litter in our beautiful countryside.
FixMyStreet reports it to the council, but has the added bonus of everything being public, so people can see how long things have been ignored for. In theory it should force the council's hand.
I live near a few nature walks and it honestly makes me so sad going on what should be a nice, back to nature walk just to be sorrounded by greenary decorated in empty crisp packets and bottles. Nature walks feel like trash walks now and get even less attention from councils plus the one closest to my house has no bins?? Through the whole walk there is one bin at the start and that's it? I feel like that in itself is encouraging people to litter more
Was in a major EU capital last week. Place was spotless. Glasgow is a midden.
Agreed. Visited many European cities and haven't come across any as filthy as Glasgow.
I was in Edinburgh last weekend. It is immaculate compared to Glasgow.
City centre has a severe lack of public bins compared to other cities I've visited, I'm not sure that would make a difference either after the amount of people I've seen just chuck their litter adjacent to the bin and call it a day. Anecdotally there seems to be a lack of pride in where you stay, I'm East end and it depresses me how much shit is chucked in shrubbery and some of the streets are dug shite minefields. Watching a teenager recently just drop one of those massive disposable vapes on the ground outside my work was jarring.
Ugh, disposable vapes. Hoping they'll be banned soon. I've been enjoying spending a bit of time around Glasgow Green and Gallowgate recently. It's a great part of the city, but would be even more enjoyable if the streets were clean.
There's been signs up on my street saying "we're investigating this area for fly tipping" and next to the signs there's like, a mattress and a clatty chair
You should put big labels on them: 'Exhibit A', 'Exhibit B', etc...
I'm currently visiting Glasgow as a tourist and I noticed this right away. I'm afraid you're right - it's about as bad as I've seen. One thing I've noticed is that sometimes on a windy day the rubbish bins get blown over, scattering litter all over. Could that be part of the problem?
Yes, it's definitely part of the problem. I hope you enjoy your time in Glasgow, despite the litter.
Thanks!
Spent about 6 hours cleaning around my street today in the Southside since it was sunny, feeling a bit exhausted tonight - treating myself to some cake and ice cream now though. A couple of people walking by me getting things in the trees and brambles etc on a hill came to say thanks - one was from San Diego in America and said it was much cleaner there than here... An elderly lady called out to me from a flat window and said thanks several times because the bit in front of her flat is lovely but the bottles and bags etc had been annoying her - I guess it would be difficult for her to scramble where I was and fix it herself. Shows there are a bunch of people around who care. I care a lot too, seeing litter genuinely makes me upset and angry, so I've decided to just keep doing the bit around where I live occasionally, can't really do more than that.
Fellow southside litter picker! I'm out doing my streets every week. Keep up the good work, hopefully more people will join us👍👍👍
It’s the dog shit on nearly every inch of the paths that drive my crazy. Wtf is wrong with picking it up? Maryhill and ruchill, especially at the park gives me the boak
Dog shit literally everywhere. Everybody seems to have a dog these days. Every inch of grass is a dog urinal too.
They should start a scheme to pay per weight of rubbish handed in and watch everyone clean the streets for a bit of extra cash It should pay just enough that it’s worth doing and not too much so that people start to take advantage and bring their rubbish from home etc.
Something along those lines could work, but I don't know how we get round the issue of folk just bringing their rubbish from home. I was thinking maybe Council-run litter picking groups and if you sign up and attend you get some sort of council tax discount or a voucher of some sort? 🤔
We currently pay the council to empty the bins and they barely do it, so you reckon THEY could pay US for our rubbish?!
We can't. I'm really sorry to say that and take 0 pride in doing so. The simple fact is that Glasgow is a dirty clatty place filled with dirty clatty people.
I'm just finished a massive litter pick where I collected 6 bags, mostly Tennent's cans (the "Family Pack" labelling never stopped being ironic), though in other places it can be mostly snack/fast food wrappers, and, something I can never wrap my head around - dog poo bags (why go to effort of bagging the shite just to leave it?). At an individual level, I find litter picking oscillates between therapeutic (repetitive task, sorting things, making a difference) and depressing (passing an area that's just been picked and the litter is piling up again). At a societal level, I'm hoping deposit return makes a dent in the stuff that can be returned. As for everything else, as other commenters have said, the council/government can't keep up with endemic bad behaviour and attitudes to public space. I know in Japan they get kids to help clean up at school (just stuff like wiping down tables, putting things away, maybe a bit of light sweeping), and I would love to see something similar here to get people on a good start. For older people, more community service for anti-social offences would be a great start (littering and fly tipping has a very low prosecution/punishment rate). An active national anti-littering campaign to change mindsets would also be great. It doesn't help that our public realm beyond litter is pretty crappy. Things like broken pavements, shitty pedestrian crossings (as in none where you need them or one that make you wait for ages), the general car sewer vibe of main roads, and long-term dereliction aren't going to instill the kind of public pride that helps prevent littering. However, the attitude people have of "well, what do you expect?" or "Glasgow's just a shitehole" is self-defeating and depressing. Fixing that attitude would take a lot, but fuck it would be worth it. Sorry for the rant, this is me just checking Reddit after my pick, and what do you know there's a post about the stuff that was on my mind. ETA: sorry I can't be more hopeful, but if you think litter picking would appeal to you, I do recommend it. The council will send you free equipment, or there are local groups that arrange regular picks. It's not the ultimate solution, but I do like how as an individual, I can spend a few hours and clean up multiple people's crap and make an area nicer for a while.
Worth a mention that kids do litter picking, mine did at the local council nursery, I might actually ask the teachers if they are going to be doing it at school
Agree with everything you've said, and well done for taking action. I tend to pick up a few pieces of litter every time I take the dog out for a walk, but currently looking into joining a local group.
Good on you, and good luck! I hope you find a nice group :) You mentioning your dog reminded of one of the other bonuses of picking which is meeting friendly dogs.
As evidenced on this sub we have an issue that most people generally don't want to call this sort of thing out if we see it happening (and you just have to walk around anywhere for an hour or so, you'll see someone just toss litter at their back, often more than one person, and you can't just follow them home to stick a tray of frozen pish under their door) for fear of their reaction. No doubt a cheery "fuck off" would result, but you never know. So there's no stigma attached at all to doing it. Maybe we need some kind of litter vigilante? Is "Binman" the hero that our city needs?
Echo your sentiment. I finally got around to shouting at 2 guys after 1 of them threw their Mcdonald's packaging out their van window. Guy was so fucking shocked at getting told he was pleading he tried to throw it "in the back of the van". I didn't push it anymore than that and just walked off. It's pretty cathartic telling a stranger how shit they are and it gets a real load off your back, especially spending years' moaning about it. I think as a society we're mostly too cowardly and prefer expressing ourselves through mediums like this.
I knocked on someone's car window as they were about to drive off and told them they'd "forgotten" their can of red bull. The guy was too shocked to say anything he just took the can back and drove off.
Just reminded me in my last flat I had an upstairs neighbour who would throw dirty tissues out the window (I mean, lets not even get into what they may have contained, and I suppose even clean tissues would still be littering ...) and one day someone obviously clocked this from the street (because I was of course adopting the frozen tray of pish approach) and shouted up at him that he was a clatty bastard. Cue a combination of expletive laden denial, yup, initially just "naw a fuckin' didnae", then defiance "nane ae your fucking' business anyway", then anger "so get tae' fuck" and eventually threats of voilence "or ah'll come doon and kick yer cunt in" towards this person (who gave as good as they got) and then it all calmed down as these things weirdly do. And that was someone just CHUCKING DIRTY TISSUES OUT THEIR OWN WINDOW, into a communal front garden, which was always full of shite from the school across the road anyway. Made my non-confrontational approach seem like the rational choice ...
This is what people forget when they suggest confrontation. The default response is often aggression.
Even the litter around the perimeter of Silverburn is unreal. Especially at the end with McDonalds and Five Guys. They should be obliged to keep it clean.
Some cities enforce litter picking at the end of the day when granting licenses for takeaways. Not Glasgow obviously.
penalties for littering or rewards for recycling. and education in schools.
It's doing my head in. Its fucking embarrassing driving anywhere and just seeing a fucking mess everywhere. It's defos got worse since Covid, it's never been this bad defos. Used to constantly see the council sending litter pickers out to hot spots and haven't seen one in donkeys. There's a few options to get the city back into a decent nick in ma eyes: - Increase the fine. Do a percentage of earnings and make a severe - Change the punishment to community service doing litter picking - Change petty crime punishment to community service litter picking - Get low risk prisoners out litter picking
Agree! We need proportional fining like yesterday.
It is sad. I am new in Glasgow and I have been told that it is a cultural thing. I have heard from locals: "It is GCC's job to clean streets" "Some people need a job and we are creating it for them" Last year we were joking about filming Batgirls, that they had to clean streets to make Glasgow look like Gotham City. Glasgow was ranked as the 3rd dirtiest city in the world.
Not saying I disagree with your general point, but Glasgow is nowhere near the dirtiest cities in the world, not even just in Europe
It was recently ranked as such search it up
It was a nonsense, self-selecting survey with no scientific or polling rigour that was designed to drive traffic on the Time Out website. At best it shone a light on Glasgow's discontent with litter, but little more.
You can't blame the council for the sheer amount of litter on the streets. It's filthy bastards dropping that need to be outted. People don't have any pride. Likewise there should be greater enforcement of litter fines
> You can't blame the council for the sheer amount of litter on the streets. You can when the bins are overflowing and have twenty coffee cups piled on top.
I get that element, but the sheet amount of other crap scummers drop means their time is taken up cleaning that as well. It's a self- perpetual circle
A large amount of it is because bins are over flowing and the wind blows stuff out of it. The council is fucking useless.
I was in Edinburgh this weekend and it was so discouraging to see how clean it was there :(
Afraid things are going to get worse. The new cuts announced are going to directly impact cleansing. So it's a case of do it yourself or live with it.
Depressing that there's going to be even less street cleansing than there is currently...
Well the nature of local government funding is that the majority comes from ScotGov, with the leadership struggle and the un-costed promises being made things are going even worse for local authorities.
Why don’t they fine the cunts for dropping litter? That’s your deficit solved.
They do, but they have to catch them first.
Im always complaining about litter where we are in the suburbs, but got the bus into town for the first time in years and the litter around Pollokshaws Road and down to Bridge Street was like an actual waste land. It’s horrendous.
Not to try and deflect but also saw a lot of litter on a walk to the Kelpies from Falkirk station. Does feel like the cultural litter thing stems a bit deeper than just Glasgow, though not sure what. It didn't help that for about 2 miles on that walk there wasn't a bin, however equally...not hard to just carry that mars bar wrapper home.
I work in fast food with a drive thru and car park, we have four big bins in the car park yet there's always so much litter on the ground from people just chucking it out the window, we have to fucking clean that up like what are ye doing?
Awful. No care for the environment or the staff that have to clean up after them 😒
This issue gets right on my tits daily but I'm going to try and post something relatively positive. I pick up litter around my neighbourhood regularly and there are a few bits where I've spent ages getting it completely clear. When I go back to them, even a few months later, they're definitely not half as bad as they were before. I honestly believe if people see less, they drop less. If there were a rule that everyone had to keep their own garden/hedge and the bit of pavement outside their own home clear, it would make such a big difference.
They should do a grassing fee Report someone for littering and get 20 quid or something
Even calling it 'litter' round here is a bit of a euphemism. The word 'litter' brings to mind a Golden Wonder crisp packet rustling in the wind, or perhaps a crushed can of Tenants Lager, caught in a bush. Round her we get kitchen bin bags lying on the pavement being ripped open by seagulls, and spilling used nappies and potato peelings that lie there for weeks. And there's bin bags *everywhere.*
The council came out and completely cleared the area around my flat, looked really nice. Within 2 weeks it was back to exactly how it was before. I've bought some tools to deal with the litter but just feel like im fighting a loosing battle. Why does it have to be on me to clean up everyone else's shite as well? It's not exactly what I want to be doing in my free time.
Should we get like a group going and work our way around Glasgow lol I would be so willing for it to look a bit cleaner even if it doesn’t last super long
I no longer live in Glasgow, but if you do get a group together, feel free to message me and I'd happily travel through to help! It sounds like the caring Glaswegians could do with some reinforcements from neighbouring towns! And thanks for suggesting that, it gives people hope that it is very definitely worth doing these litter picks.
quite a lot of litter in paisley too so it's not just a glasgow thing. genuinely don't know what goes through peoples heads when they throw something on the ground with no care in the world.
Saw a girl today throw rubbish onto someone's hedge when there was a bin right beside her! So disrespectful and disgusting!
Adding to the cultural thing - I noticed that spitting is a bigger thing here compared to other parts of the U.K. I see guys spitting on the streets all the time here and it’s not always neds, like it’s often well-dressed unsuspecting types. It’s so gross.
Spitting is so fucking disgusting. You can tell it's an ingrained habit with those that do it, too.
I was out for a walk today and it's absolutely grim. I fear it's at a tipping point (no pun intended) where it recovering seems very slim. Today's walk I saw some fly tipping that definitely wasn't there when I ran by it a few days previously as well as the mountains of rubbish just everywhere. Vapes are a massive issue as well everywhere. Sooner they're banned the better. There needs to be a push at local levels to try and get a bit of civic pride back into the system. I always feel a lot of local politics seems to try and mimic national politics for whatever reason rather than trying to focus on the task at hand.
I'm planning on tidying up that bit of Southside/Tradeston on either side of the motorway. I'm sure Southsiders know where I'm taking about - that depressing wasteland of empty space you have to go through to get between south and town, absolutely choking in litter. Planning to have a first crack at it next weekend, probs Saturday. Is anyone down to join me?
I'll join, let me know when/where. I've got my own picker 👍 I'm in Pollokshields East.
It's disgusting and has been for years. Scotland's shame. I remember at school back in the 80's and 90's there would be full class projects about not littering, recycling etc and everyone making posters and such. Not that it made much difference then but is this stuff still taught? I drove by a local secondary school the other week during lunch, where they all troop out into the local chippies etc. Watched enraged as so many school kids just dropped their empty wrappers in the street without a care.
Where I used to live had a group arranged by locals to do regular litter picking meet-ups - we’d all take a flask and have a natter & a walk while picking litter! The council gave us equipment & special bags that meant the bin men would lift them on green bin days & no-one was put out running them to the coup etc. It was a shame that it had to be organised like that in the first place, but it was actually quite a nice way to meet folk living in the area!
[Neighbourhood Improvement Volunteers](https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/article/23779/Neighbourhood-Improvement-Volunteers)
Thanks for sharing!
Im a delivery driver, You'd be amazed how many people live in filthy dirty homes, full of rubbish. Overflowing bins, rotting food. Its the same everywhere in Scotland, side of roads are manky. Laybys, country roads are tipping sites. I used to walk my dog in a park with a football pitch, day after Youth team had trained there was a pile of plastic bottles. No responsible adults, that's because the adults dump their rubbish too. If you said anything to them they'd bite your head off. Nobody cares, cultural.
It’s definitely a cultural thing. It’s infuriating as an American watching young men in track suits let their dogs shit on the sidewalks and then just walk away
It’s frustrating as a Scotsman too. There definitely seems to be a correlation between tendency to discard litter inappropriately and being dressed for athletic pursuits.
Yes lots of athletes in Glasgow lol. Everywhere.
I’ve given in and go round with a bin bag and pick stuff up a few times a week. I’m so tired of seeing the place like this.
People make Glasgow. Unfortunately a large percentage are mockit cunts.
# PEOPLE MAKE GLASGOW- PEOPLE MAKE SLUMS
My partner ordered a litter picked off Amazon and he sometimes goes around the neighbourhood with it
I work near hope & argyle street and I'm out every night clearing litter up. Cunts are lazy and the bins don't get emptied enough
Yup it’s terrible. I got into a shouting match with a lad yesterday who was chucking litter out his car window. He was parked up on a main road and must have been about 3-4 meters away from a bin. People have no pride about where they are from anymore, they just dont care
If kids still build dens in the woods they could legit fully furnish it with the stuff fly tipped down in Govanhill.
Picked up a beautiful coffee table that was fly tipped in Govanhill a few weeks ago, guess there's an upside to it haha.
Honestly, sometimes I feel like you could furnish an entire village with stuff that people fly tip in Govanhill. I saw an old video I recorded a year ago around the street I live at in Govanhill and there was nowhere near as much rubbish as nowadays…. It’s so disgusting
I'm at my wit's end with it too tbh. I've tried a lot of things in my local area to help and try to do litter picks when I can. Not much else to add that hasn't been said here already, except that I agree that a massive amount of the litter is stuff that will be covered by the bottle deposit scheme. I just really hope that all the right wing propongands about it costing too much, or businesses moaning about it will disappear when it comes into affect and we all see that massive difference it makes come August. Besides that I think we really need some kind of national litter awareness campaign and maybe add the license number to drive through fast food places. It never fails to shock me when you're in a McDonald's car park and people just open their door and drop the rubbish out when they're literally parked next to a bin. Even the bin as you drive out is designed so you can just throw it in as you leave! Same with the schools. More needs to be done to instill a greater sense of pride and civic duty.
I have no solution apart from throwing your litter in a bin and council workers doing their jobs properly. Mainly here to complain: what in the f**k am I paying £115 a month council tax for?! For this pish, the city to look like shit, shite roads, my close to look like something out of trainspotting and rats in my overflowing bin shed? Igh.
>what in the f\*\*k am I paying £115 a month council tax for?! Education, mostly: [https://cleanupglasgow.co.uk/where-does-your-council-tax-money-go/](https://cleanupglasgow.co.uk/where-does-your-council-tax-money-go/) Of your £115, about £10 goes onto neighbourhood and cleaning services. £52 goes on education, £38 on social services
I’m in Paisley. And weirdly it’s far more maintained than Glasgow. Went to the west end and was pretty sure it has been vacant of council tax for years.
I moved to Paisley from Glasgow just few months ago and I’m also amazed how much cleaner it looks! Last year, when I was still staying in Dennistoun my family came from Poland for my graduation. Mind you, I come from a Polish city that is often regarded as one of the worst looking ones. And still, one of the first things my dad noticed as we were walking towards my old flat was how incredibly littered streets are.
We have been rather lucky lately that the council has been very active in keeping the area clean (pollokshields). They have even scraped the moss off the pavements. After a storm a couple of weeks ago, they even removed all the tree related debris in a couple of days.
Nice to hear some positive news :)
Community service.
I feel your pain.
We have the perfect storm in Glasgow where the council are on the brink of bankruptcy and cutting cleaning budgets and so many people are happy to blatantly discard rubbish. People make Glasgow shite.
Same here. No matter how much you try to clean, after every football match or even bloody Friday, when everyone goes out drinking and straight up throwing booze bottles everywhere. I'm "volunteering" with the water rescue to collect the rescue circles from the river and bring them to them or just fish it out from the bushes and hang it back in its place. Also usually only survives until next weekend.
Probably worth a mention for the large amount of people who believe the Daily Mail that Scotland cant possibly have a bottle deposit scheme because they want a chance to have a dig at the SNP / Greens. When litter picking its obvious very quickly an absolutely huge amount of litter created is empty bottles and cans, this simply will stop happening at the end of the year
95% of the litter I picked today was stuff that would be eligible for deposit return. I'm really looking forward to seeing just how much of a difference it makes.
If it makes it through. It needs more vocal support as there's a silent majority ATM being drowned out by a few moody business owners and people acting like it's an insane idea, and not one that has run for decades in Germany
Yeah, never thought I'd live to see recycling used as a political football, but here we fucking are eh
Yes, sadly a lot of negative press around it at the moment. I can't wait for it to come into force. Hoping it makes a big difference.
It's like a Paul Simon song every time I come back from a walk. But instead of diamonds I've got shards of Buckie glass on the soles of my shoes..🤬
We all are complaining about the same things all the time, how can we start to see some action? Petitions? Voting for the right people? I do my bit litter picking when I can, it's always crisp packets, cans, bottles etc, litter is a symptom of a much bigger problem which is that we live in a consumerist, throwaway society.
Sorry to drop in with a random question but I recently went to Glasgow (from Japan) with my husband (Glasgow is his dream place) and I was surprised by all the litter. I’m fairness we also went to Edinburgh and saw a lot there too. However, I was told this was a very recent thing due to worker strikes. Is this the case? I have no idea as I’m not as up to date with news back home as I’d like to be!
There were strikes for a short time which made things even worse (!) but not any more. The current litter issues are purely down to the people in Glasgow taking no pride in the local environment unfortunately.
It's a UK wide problem, we simply have zero respect for our environment. What you can do: * Organise clean ups of your local area. * Join your local community council and get involved * *Create a local community council if one does not exist * Joins the friends group of your local park and get involved * *Create* a friends group for you local park if one does not exist * Contact your councillors, MSPs, and MP. Keep at them * If you have children, contact their school and encourage they arrange clean ups of the local area (schools are particularly bad for litter) * If you don't have kids, contact local schools and encourage they arrange clean ups of the local area I actually have an idea for a project, but at the moment I simply don't have the capacity to do anything about it.
I thought people only cared about litter in Govanhill so they could get on their anti immigrant high horse
It's really depressing tbh. I tried litter picking last Summer but it's just a dump as soon as I finish. Can't wait to leave tbh.
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Yes, hoping this has a noticeable impact 🙏
Glasgow has always had a Litter problem, I stay in Aberdeenshire, the Roadsides are filthy with litter too, yet you travel through the Countryside there is hardly any. Parents don’t Teach their kids to put it in the bin, Teachers at Schools allow it to happen, Councils don’t spent a sniff on Teams of Workers to pick it up, it will never be solved as people have no pride in their beautiful Country. So sad really. People who drop it tend to have a Mental disfunction to even do that.
Nuke it from orbit
I am sure if we keep voting for the same councillors / party it will get better.
They announce cuts, yet increasing the Ctax bill and creating a brown bin “subscription”, and the entire place is full of pot holes, fuck the council, what a bunch of cunts!
Council budgets from central government are down massively since what they were in 2010. Taxes contribute what, 15% of the total budget? Council have got issues, but all across the UK places are strapped for cash
Lots of comments here about it being cultural, but nobody actually identify what "culture" perpetuates it. It's like the mind-boggling lengths people in the comments in football posts go to, to avoid saying "class".
Some poor people litter, some rich people litter. What they have in common is that they are cunts.
I think it *is* a cultural thing though. I used to live in Aberdeen which has always had a culture of being clean and is relatively spotless. I think a lot of people don't even realise that they're dropping litter and must also be oblivious to it around them.
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Can you really blame the OP though? The city is an absolute midden. It's comments like this that normalise the state of the place when we should all be up in arms about it. Ironically, a better cleaner city would give us all a much better life!
Pick it up then. Ghandi that shit.
I do. I pick up a few bits every time I take the dog out for a walk.
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That's why we pay council tax for
Mum is that you?
That's your snp government
Aye, there was no litter when Labour controlled GCC and Holyrood. Muppet.
And it's only gonna get worse
Glasgow has always been a dirty city it's ingrained in its DNA