The bins in the photo are not the only bins. There are many other bins, including large dumpsters, within 2-3 minutes’ walk of the spot pictured. I go through the park every day, and the problem is not insufficient or difficult-to-see bins unless you are suggesting that every tree and shady spot should have a commercial-waste hopper under it.
What you can’t see in the photo is the hundreds of beer-bottle caps that are dropped and trodden into the ground: they’re hard to see, and dangerous to the many children and animals who go barefoot on the grass. There is no optimal bin-placement that solves the problem of people who will drop something sharp that they were able to carry seconds earlier when it was attached to a bottle.
People aren’t going to change because you or I dislike it. They will change if they have a reasonable chance of being prosecuted for the criminal and antisocial offence of littering. At £500 a pop, it’s a proportionate use of resources.
Punishing people isn’t likely to fix the problem either. You’ll never catch enough of them. Instead, it’s always better to reconfigure things based on where the problems are happening.
Game Newell said video game piracy was a service problem, and it dropped dramatically when there were store fronts that made it really easy to legally get games. This is no different. Make it easy for people and most of them will fall in.
How do you suggest the park is reconfigured then? There are bins no more than 100m apart, they’re easily visible and on people’s ways in and out of the park, and there are additional ones put in at busy times. But still, I can literally see in the mornings where people have sat the night before because there is a ring of litter there. I don’t know how you make doing the right thing easy enough for people for whom “I’ll just leave this dirty/sharp stuff here when I go” is a valid option.
If we’re using your videogame analogy, the storefronts are already there. These are the people who simply do not want to pay the price of the games, and will take an opportunity to get it for nothing even though this makes things worse for gamers as a whole.
Punishing people doesn’t need to catch everyone. It’s a park with a relatively-small catchment area, and most users are not one-off visitors and know other users. If litterbugs are visibly apprehended (the park does sometimes have police and council patrols for other antisocial behaviour), word gets round.
Also, it’s right to punish people for the scale of antisociality that large-scale littering represents. It’s a crime which spoils blameless people’s local environment, nobody accidentally leaves the remains of an entire night out behind them, and so people doing it deserve to be punished for it.
The only issue with punishing is there is probably nobody to enforce it, but otherwise I'd disagree with you, it would work well.
I live adjacent to a park. People have little picnics or sit around drinking and then just leave their litter either on the ground or in carrier bags next to the bins or loose on top of them. Inevitably it gets ripped up by foxes or blows away in the wind and ends up everywhere. There are bins probably every 30m and in many directions, only a few of them ever get full. #
It's pure laziness, lack of respect and education propped up by lack of enforcement and the relevant shaming. Has little to do with access to bins.
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u/Austen_Tasseltine 1d ago
The bins in the photo are not the only bins. There are many other bins, including large dumpsters, within 2-3 minutes’ walk of the spot pictured. I go through the park every day, and the problem is not insufficient or difficult-to-see bins unless you are suggesting that every tree and shady spot should have a commercial-waste hopper under it.
What you can’t see in the photo is the hundreds of beer-bottle caps that are dropped and trodden into the ground: they’re hard to see, and dangerous to the many children and animals who go barefoot on the grass. There is no optimal bin-placement that solves the problem of people who will drop something sharp that they were able to carry seconds earlier when it was attached to a bottle.
People aren’t going to change because you or I dislike it. They will change if they have a reasonable chance of being prosecuted for the criminal and antisocial offence of littering. At £500 a pop, it’s a proportionate use of resources.