Don't rubbish our roads!

One of the things that I can never quite get my head around is the amount of rubbish I see along the sides of our roads. It's obscene. Why do people feel they have to throw their rubbish out of their car (and truck) windows?

The problem seems worse during the winter when the leaves don't hide the almost grotesque number of plastic bags, bottles, cans and fag packets that seem to infest every roadside.

I was driving along the A14 again today and noticed a sign on the side of the road near the Kettering turn off. It said; "Litter picking in progress." This came as a surprise as that particular stretch has always been particularly blighted by litter, and my natural cynicism with regard to local councils, makes me thing that litter is generally pretty low on the list of priorities. So I took the time to actually look out for the "litter pickers."

Safe to say there wasn't a soul in sight for more than five miles. But what I did see were clean verges! It was blatantly obvious they had recently passed that way because the verges looked like verges rather than the usual rubbish tip decoration.

So this post is dedicated, with undying thanks, to Northamptonshire County Council for their sterling work in making at least a short stretch of the A14 a little more civilised, if only until the barbarians who prefer to rubbish our roads find out about it.

Of course, it's not only in the UK that litter bugs are prevalent, and maybe it's an Anglo Saxon thing, because the same things happens in Australia. I can remember when I was living over there, there was a Oz Government ad campaign that used the phrase; "Don't rubbish Australia." (That's where the post title came from.)

Now I see the Aussies have a new campaign, (see below) and this poster looks pretty good at pointing out the problem of using your country as a rubbish tip.



Now why can't our government do something similar? Maybe because all our highly paid MPs don't venture too far outside London, and certainly not by road, so it's a case of "out of sight, out of mind."

Shame on them. And shame on the pigs who think it's OK to rubbish the country I unfortunately have to share with them!