A new report commissioned by Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) has identified five community-level activities that can prevent local litter problems.

The ‘Litter Prevention Community Engagement: Options Paper’, authored by Eunomia Research and Consulting on behalf of ZWS, identifies ways in which community-level activities can best be developed and supported to bring about litter prevention.

The report brings together findings from research, interviews, workshops, and case studies to identify the five options that have the most potential to prevent littering.

It is hoped that the findings will help Scotland achieve the objectives of its national litter strategy, reduce the £45-million cost of cleaning up litter, and enable ZWS to ‘best support communities to deliver real impact in their areas’.

Options identified

Eunomia identified five options for community-level activity:

• communication campaigns to raise awareness of local litter and encourage behaviour change;
• litter pick ‘plus’ – clean-ups designed to maximise the litter prevention impacts through broad engagement with the local community;
• monitoring and citizen science, which involves volunteers carrying out data collection and a range of monitoring techniques to inform interventions;
• incentives for behaviour change to motivate local communities to prevent litter from occurring – for example, the best performing neighbourhood in a town-wide scheme could receive new play equipment;
• wider community approaches, including: community green space and street improvements that repurpose sites for community use; and wider community building – for example, organising a street party or event, to develop a sense of civic pride leading to litter prevention effects.

‘Making Scotland’s communities safer and more pleasant places to live’

Speaking of the report today, Iain Gulland, Chief Executive of Zero Waste Scotland said: “Scotland’s national litter strategy, ‘Towards a Litter-free Scotland’, focuses on preventing litter being dropped in the first place, to reduce the need for clean up or enforcement. This new report will help us to best support communities to deliver real impact in their areas, and builds on our recent litter insights work, which revealed that people are most upset by litter left on their doorstep.”

He added: “Litter is an eyesore and spoils Scotland’s natural beauty. As well as the obvious costs of cleaning, education and enforcement, our research shows that litter and fly-tipping has indirect costs of over £25 million a year, for example impacts on mental health and neighbourhood safety. By tackling the problem at its origin, we can help to make Scotland’s communities safer and more pleasant places to live.”

Read the ‘Litter Prevention Community Engagement: Options Paper’.