LAWR

STREET SCENE 16 Local Authority Waste & Recycling July 2015 The Centre for Social Innovation is Keep Britain Tidy's new research and innovation hub, bringing together our work over the past two years to develop new approaches to solve the issues we face. The centre takes a unique approach towards issues. We tend to avoid traditional techniques like surveys and focus groups and focus on observing behaviours directly as they happen. This enables us to build up a unique insight into the behavioural context that leads to common problems like littering, dog fouling or wasting food. Our solutions are then designed to effectively address the behavioural drivers identified and then we work with local partners on the ground to robustly test them. So far the centre has worked on more than 20 specific pieces of research or solutions since 2014. Our 'Smoking Zones' experiment demonstrated that, New hub to help behaviour nudge take-away and fast food packaging to remind consumers to dispose of litter responsibly". Whilst some big businesses are acting more responsibly towards litter, more can be done. Let's not forget that the Wrigleys, McDonalds and Benson & Hedges of this world have multi-million pound marketing budgets and some of the most brilliant communications minds available. Meanwhile, budget- squeezed councils are left to clear up the mess their brands, however inadvertently, create. Their customers must also take the rap, says Eunomia's Sherrington. A keen supporter of shifting the burden of financial responsibility, Sherrington's 'Clean Sweep' report in March focuses on using financial and other incentives to deter littering behaviour and encourage product innovation to target the most commonly littered items. The proposals include levies on chewing gum and cigarettes "to ensure that clean-up costs are borne by the users of these products rather than the public at large". A deposit refund scheme for drinks packaging would also "significantly reduce littering and increase recycling" – in 2013 only 57% of aluminium and 61% of steel cans made it back into the reprocessing system (see page 14). Sherrington also makes the case for a tax on single-use cups – 2.5 billion of them are discarded every year in the UK: large and light, they fill bins quickly and can disperse widely if thrown on the floor. The packaging industry has long maintained that it is unfair to single out certain items, but Sherrington doesn't see an issue with it. He says the bottom line is "whether the benefit of such an intervention outweighs the cost". The debate around deposit schemes and levies will likely continue well into this parliament. Higher fines for littering may also be on the cards, but the figures available suggest that particular intervention isn't necessarily money – or time – well spent. In 2013, 5,500 people were convicted in magistrates' courts of littering; the average fine was £140. It's a costly process, so many councils stick to fixed penalty notices (FPNs), which vary between £40 and £80, with the average somewhere around £75. The latest figures available are from 2008/09, which show that 30,678 penalties were issued, but only 19,039 were paid. That's an 'income' of £1.4m – or a shade under 0.2% of the clean up costs. at train stations, pointing smokers towards specific discrete areas where they could smoke enabled less littering and nicer environments for everyone else to enjoy. Meanwhile, the 'We're Watching You' project showed that dog walkers were more inclined to pick up after their dogs when they had the feeling they were being watched. All our work is designed so that it can be repeated elsewhere – in fact, 'We're Watching You' has so far been used by more than 60 local partners. Helen Bingham is marketing manager at Keep Britain Tidy Big brands have multi-million pound marketing budgets

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