If you were to throw, say a banana peel out of your car while driving along the motorway, that would be a completely harmless action, due to the fact that it's part of a fruit — right? Actually, no. A banana peel can take up to two years to biodegrade, and with a third of motorists admitting to littering while driving, that's a whole lot of thrown-away banana peels, or much worse. An orange peel and a cigarette butt have a similar biodegrading term to that of a banana, but tin or aluminum cans last up to 100 years; and plastic bottles last forever, as do glass bottles, Styrofoam cups and plastic bags.
Despite the fact that longer-lasting materials will serve to damage the environment and its animals for longer, we can't only measure the severity of a certain type of rubbish by its lifetime. For example, despite having a fairly short biodegrading span, more than 120 tons of cigarette-related litter is thrown away in the UK every day. Similarly, our regular littering here and there has caused the UK's rat population to increase by 60 million. This suddenly isn't so mysterious when you consider that since the 1960s our annual littering has increased by an astonishing 500 percent.
It's not a cheap habit either: UK taxpayers shelve out £500 million in order to keep our streets clean, and when you include our green spaces, that goes up to £1 billion. So, it's not surprising that if caught fly-tipping you could face a £20,000 fine or even jail time and, if you disposed of something dangerous, the court could give you five years to serve.
To take back our beautiful countryside and cities we need to do more than simply not leaving rubbish where it ought not to be. We need a pride makeover. We need to truly care more about the world around us.
