I have been driving up and down the A3 from Petersfield to Guildford to visit my dear father, who has just had a knee replacement. The rubbish lining the 26-mile trip is horrific, a ticker-tape parade of people’s selfishness.
I would have preferred to write ignorance instead of selfishness, but that just won’t do: everyone knows that litter is bad. A very conservative estimate would be that there were two pieces of litter for every foot of the journey and, by way of simple maths, that means that there were at least 549,120 pieces of litter spread on both sides of the road. I didn’t take into account what was in the central reservation.
Half a million selfish actions on just 26 miles of the UK’s 29,145 miles of main roads. If every one of them was as bad, that would mean that there are 615 million pieces of litter on the verges. I truly hope I’m wrong, but the total road network is about 245,000 miles in the UK, so we can be certain that there are billions of pieces of litter across the whole country.
What’s another piece of litter to someone winding down the car window when there’s already so much? We who care must make a stand as it’s ruining the beauty of our nation, killing wildlife and creating a country of litter louts. One reader has suggested a slogan: Don’t be a tosser—take your litter home. I couldn’t agree more.
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