In all, the team is out on the street for an hour or so, a group of people that have seen the rubbish in their community and decided to do something. They’re called NaeTrash and it was started by Scott Martin and Lindy Brits, who could see the litter from their flat in Kinning Park and decided to organise regular littler picks. It’s now started gathering momentum and become a bit of a movement and the streets are cleaner as a result.
I got involved myself when I saw Scott, in vivid pink NaeTrash tabard, picking up litter on Paisley Road West and got chatting to him about what he was doing. He told me about his group and I volunteered to help and that’s why I’m out on a Saturday morning on Shields Road with a bag and one of those grabby picky-uppy things, who knows what they’re called, picking up vapes and bottles and God knows what else. We do the stretch of Shields Road from the underground station down to Houston Street and I must say it’s satisfying, seeing the pile of bin liners grow and the street become a little bit cleaner.
Afterwards, standing round the day’s haul of rubbish, we get talking about what’s going on with the litter. Has it got worse? Is Glasgow, Scotland, the UK, worse than other countries? Is there something in our culture, something a bit off, that’s led to this litter all over the place? It’s hard not to see the rubbish, on the streets, in the lay-bys, clinging to the hedges and the trees, and think it’s a sign of something that’s gone wrong in the last few decades with the lesson we used to learn as children (enforced, in the 70s, with a clout) that throwing litter on the ground was wrong.
Cue a couple of anecdotes. Scott of NaeTrash tells me about one of the times they were out picking up litter and a couple walked past with their kid who dropped litter right in front of the volunteers without any hint of embarrassment or admonishment (that takes some cheek, or lack of shame: to drop litter in front of litter pickers). I also tell Scott about the time I was standing outside a takeaway on Shettleston Road and watched pupils casually drop the boxes and bags on the street. I made the traditional British response – a loud tut – but it made no difference I regret to say.
Scott says he sometimes looks to the internet for an explanation, like we often do, and concludes that there’s just less shame in the world and that people are less embarrassed by things that would’ve been frowned on 50 years ago. Another of the volunteers, Tom Napper, says we have to be careful not to blame the kids and young folk – they just copy the adults, he says. The other obvious issue is that litter is worse in areas of deprivation such as Shettleston; people sometimes say to me it’s because people stop caring about areas that are in a poor state – no one else cares so why should I? – but Tom makes the fair point that it’s the areas of deprivation that have the most takeaways and it’s takeaways that produce a lot of the rubbish.
Read more
Glasgow’s rubbish-bin millions: where has the money gone? | The Herald
Mark Smith: We will not fix Glasgow until we fix the bins | The Herald
Happy birthday Glasgow. I love you (despite you know what) | The Herald
The question of whether litter is a British, or Scottish, cultural problem is also complicated. One of the litter pickers tells me he lived in Spain for four years and that litter and rubbish is definitely worse in Scotland and he wonders if it’s to do with Scottish attitudes to drinking. Certainly, quite a lot of the rubbish I pick up on Shields Road is made up of bottles of beer and spirits. I also pick up a couple of canisters of nitrous oxide which is allegedly for use in the dairy industry but these canisters, chucked from cars no doubt, are signs that it’s being abused for other reasons.
But Lindy, co-founder of NaeTrash, isn’t so sure about Scotland being worse. She grew up in South Africa and says filth and litter is just as much a problem there; she also tells me about how surprised she was when she was in Sicily recently and discovered that litter is everywhere there too. The problem, she says, is that once you start seeing the litter, it’s hard to unsee it.
She does think there’s a particular problem in Glasgow, but again it’s quite hard to pin down the exact reasons. There’s certainly been pressure on the council’s cleansing budget in recent years and it certainly doesn’t have enough staff to deal with the litter issue. Cutting the number of street bins in favour of fewer but larger bins has also contributed to the problem. On the other hand, the council has recently invested £7million in 200 new posts in cleansing and parks, part of which will be neighbourhood clean teams attached to each ward that can react to particular problems. This will help.
Scott, Lindy and Tom with the results of the day’s pick (Image: Newsquest)
The NaeTrash team also tell me the council have been appreciative of their work and will be coming out later to remove the hill of rubbish we’ve collected on Shields Road. In some ways, the volunteers are also sympathetic to the council or rather unsympathetic to the sort of people who would blame the council. There’s a certain type who’ll say “why should I be picking up litter, it’s the council’s job”. But Lindy is clear on her view: people should take responsibility for their community, she says.
Having spent an hour picking up other people’s rubbish, I’m inclined to agree with her. The council absolutely needs to do better – more bins for God’s sake, more bins. But as Tom puts it, it’s not the council that’s dropping the litter and the only way things are going to improve is if we, some of us, more of us, go out and do something. It’s an old-fashioned phrase I guess, but it’s a phrase that comes up quite a few times in our conversations on the litter pick: personal responsibility.
And so, at the risk of sounding a bit preachy and smug having done my bit with the grabby picky-uppy thing, could I ask you to check out NaeTrash, or another similar group, or start up a group of your own. Quite a few of the volunteers said how depressing the site of so much rubbish can be, but the opposite applies too: it feels very satisfying, uplifting even, to see the streets cleaned up. The phrase Lindy uses is “litter debt” – there’s a litter debt we’ve built up and we need to pay it off. A little bit of it has just been done on Shields Road in Glasgow. Now we work out from there.