Litter and flytipping: scale and cost

1 Introduction, Background & Context

The Scottish Government is devising a new National Litter and Flytipping Strategy. The current National Litter Strategy was published in 2014 and includes an estimate on the cost of litter and flytipping to public bodies in Scotland. This figure is commonly quoted in parliament, as well as in anti-littering and flytipping messaging. The purpose of this study was to update this figure – and other key data points relevant to understanding the scale and cost of litter and flytipping – to reflect the current climate regarding the litter and flytipping situation in Scotland. The Scottish Government has commissioned Eunomia to undertake this research.

In order for this research to develop a holistic and comprehensive cost of litter and flytipping across the entire Scottish economy, the study had a broad scope, encompassing the scale and cost of litter and flytipping experienced and paid for by the following entities:

• The 32 Local Authorities (LAs) in Scotland;
• Other public bodies with a statutory duty to keep land clear of litter (such as the Crown Estate and Scottish Canals);
• Other public bodies without this obligation (such as SEPA or Police Scotland); and
• Private bodies / landowners (e.g., farmers, recreational land, housing associations).

This would require the collection, evaluation, and interpretation of primary data relating to litter and flytipping for the financial year 2019-2020, from LAs, other public bodies, and private bodies. As such, this process was heavily reliant on stakeholder engagement. The financial year 2019-2020 was picked because this is the most recent data available that is unaffected by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on litter and flytipping services, and therefore is most likely to be representative of typical annual costs. In addition to this cost, the research also sought to cover:

• The most commonly littered and flytipped items;
• The value of materials (to the circular economy) lost from litter and flytipping;
• The value of volunteering in clearing litter and flytipping;
• The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on litter and flytipping; and
• The specific challenges faced by the Scottish Highlands and islands as a result of litter and flytipping.

Whilst the risk of limited engagement was recognised prior to beginning the project and was continually revisited throughout, the mitigation strategies put in place (e.g., drawing on contacts who had previously engaged in a similar study, expanding the pool of stakeholders, using a letter of support from Scottish Government, etc.) were unable to overcome the research challenges faced, and therefore only a very limited amount of data was able to be collected. Section 2.1.1 explores these research challenges, their causes, their impacts, and then includes a series of recommendations that Scottish Government may wish to consider should they decide to revisit or repeat this research exercise in the future.

1.1 Key Definitions

The first step in carrying out this study is to define both litter and flytipping. The Scottish Government’s Code of Practice on Litter and Refuse defines the following terms^[1]:

• Litter is “waste in the wrong place” where individual or a small number of items are thrown down, dropped or deposited in a public place by any person and is left there. Materials that could be considered as litter are wide ranging, including food packaging, drink containers, smoking related materials including cigarette ends, chewing gum, food items, paper and plastic bags; and
• Flytipping is the illegal disposal of controlled waste – from a single bag of waste to large quantities of domestic, commercial or construction waste.

Following the definition of litter and flytipping, litter services include:

• Litter picking (on the ground, or caught in trees and shrubs);
• Manual street litter sweeping; and
• Picking of dog fouling, chewing gum and sex/drugs/clinical litter.

As was the case in the previous study from 2013, litter placed in bins or associated with gully or road clearance (i.e., mechanical road sweepers) are explicitly excluded for two principal reasons. First, even if no littering occurred, public bins still need to be provided. Similarly, a significant proportion of the material cleared from gullies and roads is naturally occurring, consequently this service would still need to be provided even if no littering took place.

In this report the following distinction is made between direct and indirect costs of litter:

• Direct costs of litter are the costs to LAs and other bodies with and without statutory responsibilities of engaging in the clean-up of litter and clearance of flytipping, including treatment/disposal of the associated waste; and
• Indirect costs are those costs visited on other actors in the economy (and on nature and wildlife).

Further to direct and indirect costs, a differentiation is made between the “spend” and “cost” related to litter and flytipping. The “spend” refers to the amount currently spent on clearing and disposing of litter and flytipping; whereas “cost” refers to the amount that would need to be spent to clear all littered and flytipped material in the environment.