Anyone who drives around Leitrim and Roscommon will be well aware of the filth that lines our rural roads.

This is a national embarrassment, but to date, it hasn’t even registered on the Government’s To-Do list.

The reason why are roads are so filthy is because of the Litter Monitoring Survey (LMS).

This was set up under the Litter Pollution Act, 1997 and is the only mechanism used by the Government to monitor our litter levels.

Basically, it involves Council officials taking a walk down the Main Street of their county town every now and then and picking up what ever litter they find. They then take it back to a depot and count up the various types of litter they find. The results are collated nationally and sent to the Department. These results are then used to formulate litter policy.

There are 2 principle problems with this:

1. Analysis only occurs in urban areas

The availability of bins helps alleviate litter pollution, so litter in urban areas is less of problem than on rural roads. However, the LMS bases its national analysis on litter collection in urban areas, and doesn’t distinguish between the problem in urban areas and on rural roads, so clearly, it is going to underestimate the problem on rural roads.

2. It is volume based, rather than impact based

Under the LMS, 1 cigarette butt is equal to 1 plastic bottle, despite the fact than the plastic bottle is 50 times more visible and takes about 10 years to degrade. Furthermore, litter items like chewing gum and cigarette butts are going to feature much more in urban areas, while plastic bottles will not, given that at least some people will put them in bins. However, plastic bottles are the primary cause of litter pollution on rural roads, because of the number of them sold at petrol stations.

It is for this reason that the LMS reports obviously inaccurate statistics like:

75% of all litter in Ireland is either cigarette butts or chewing gum!
1% of litter in Ireland is plastic bottles!

I have been lobbying the Department re. rural litter for 3 years. Last year I made a breakthrough, in that I was invited to consult on a Position Paper that Failte Ireland presented to the the Department on litter pollution.

I pointed out my concerns re. the LMS and noted that the best way to tackle litter is not to penalise people for creating it, but to attach an economic value to litter so that people are less likely to throw it away. This can be facilitated through Reverse Vending, where people can return used plastic and aluminium to Reverse Vending machines where they will receive monetary credit for what they return.

This is now official Failte Ireland policy in relation to litter, and while the Department has agreed to instruct the LMS to include rural roads in their analysis this year, they adamantly refuse to consider Reverse Vending. Their stated reasons are: only 1% of Irish litter is plastic or aluminium, and (wait for it) Irish people are not sophisticated enough to use deposit refund systems!

I actually have a letter from the Minister for State for the Environment, Batt O’Keefe which says this!