A NEW spectacle has emerged amidst the urban landscape where I spend my working week: a street cleaner who manages somehow to leave the place exactly as he found it: strewn with litter and the remnants of party life around the pubs, clubs and fast food purveyors nearby.
Not so long ago our street was attended to by a charming guy with a big brush who took on the chore of keeping the place in order several times a week. Not only was he adroit at his job but he could keep us up to date with all the local gossip too. There is always juicy gossip in an area where gentrification jostles with squalor, student flats proliferate and local hostelries open or close often.
His successor today, after several years of neglect, has the haunted look of a man who has taken to the streets only because the cleansing department are keeping his loved ones hostage until he finishes the job. His languid approach attracts a regular audience, such is its ineffectiveness. Only every fourth cigarette butt succumbs to his litter-picker. An entire dump of Buckfast bottles and beer cans, squeezed behind one of those green telecoms boxes after a major football match, lay for six weeks until a local resident gave in and cleared it out herself.
This is not to blame the reluctant street cleaner entirely for the state of affairs which afflicts many streets in Glasgow. In a block with several offices, hundreds of flats, a very popular pub and a Tesco, just one small bin was attached to a lamp-post. Recently the council added a second. Both are full to over-flowing, regularly. No doubt the elected members and highly-paid officials will blame “the cuts” for this sorry state. The city blames Holyrood, and Holyrood blames Westminster. So it goes.
I spent Easter weekend in Warsaw. On a Sunday morning stroll towards the historical Old Town, we watched as an athletic council worker jogged between rubbish bins – situated next to nearly every single lamp-post – replacing rubbish bags. Here was some impressive cleansing work, during a three-day public holiday. The same bags were replaced the following day.
The Poles know that it is important for the city to look good, not least for the numerous tourists. So why does Glasgow, with all its marketing waffle about people and places, put up with streets that are frankly an embarrassment?
An official body called Zero Waste Scotland found that Scotland spends more than £53 million a year dealing with litter and fly-tipping. That amounts to more than 15,000 tonnes of rubbish, or 250m “easily visible items”. There are estimated to be 61,000 incidents of fly-tipping each year.
Glasgow’s apparent inability to clean its streets effectively is an issue, but the blame cannot be blamed entirely at the council. An examination of the rubbish dumped – plastic bags, food and drinks containers, even shopping trolleys – is the fault of you and me, the public whose apparent disregard for our surroundings is at the root of the problem. Amidst all the talk about Brexit and this or that referendum, it would be nice if somebody, somewhere took on the litter that blights Scotland once and for all.
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