Liverpool City Council has joined forces with Keep Britain Tidy as part of a unique education and enforcement programme to tackle litter in the city.
The collaboration follows an invitation earlier this year to the national environmental charity to benchmark Liverpool’s cleanliness.
After a city-wide inspection of more than 300 sites, Keep Britain Tidy found Liverpool’s litter and graffiti to be three times the national average.
The benchmarking did find positive results for the city, with fly-posting at almost half the benchmark standard.
In response, the city council, which spends £9.5m a year cleaning up litter, is launching a year-long environmental action programme to improve its results, with an initial summertime focus on litter in parks and dog fouling.
The programme will be based on five key principles:
- Get things right first time – A huge amount of council time and money is spent responding to littering complaints
- Tackle business waste and litter – Through a new waste partnership with Liverpool BID Company and Chamber of Commerce
- Behaviour change – Various targeted campaigns to engage residents, businesses and visitors in the right behaviours
- Maximising community action and volunteering – Specifically with Friends of Parks groups
- Enforcement –With investment in and a greater use of technology
Keep Britain Tidy will undertake a follow-up city-wide survey next January to assess the impact of the programme.
Liverpool City Council has already invested more than £8m in its alleyways programme to create safe and cleaner neighbourhoods and is rolling out improved litter bins in the city’s major parks. Money has also been invested in CCTV monitoring to identify and prosecute fly-tippers.
Plans are also being developed for a new type of bin which will help the city tackle the issue of black bag waste for more than 27,000 households.
Chrisie Byrne, Chair of the Liverpool Friends of Parks Forum, said, “We welcome this new partnership and look forward to working with Liverpool City Council and Keep Britain Tidy in the future so that our green spaces are safer, cleaner and greener for all to enjoy.
“The role of volunteers is crucial in this partnership. We have hundreds of people every day in our parks and greenspaces helping to keep them clean and tidy, collecting thousands of bin bags of litter a month so our visitors can enjoy the parks and the wildlife can live in them safely.
“We always need more volunteers but we hope this new arrangement will help to change attitudes and behaviours in the general public to reduce litter being dropped and we can focus on other important jobs to help improve the parks.”
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