BIG BRAND LITTER

Introduction

If you spend anytime litter picking, you soon learn that the rubbish in the countryside is dominated by a small number of food and drinks brands. These brands ship huge volumes of products, in some cases billions of units, into the UK market. At present, other than putting a tiny "tidy man" logo on the container, they take little or no responsibility for the litter they cause. Currently, it is Local Authorities and ultimately Council Tax payers that pick up the tab for clearing up the littering of these products.

These companies need to recognise littering as a significant environmental impact of their business and do more to reduce it. Unfortunately, despite their glossy Corporate Responsibility reports, I do not believe they will do anything significant on a voluntary basis. This is why we need to implement legislation such as a Bottle Bill (compulsory deposits on bottles and cans) if we want to reduce littering.

Coca-Cola

According to Coca-Cola's UK website "Discarded soft drinks packaging is a small but visible example of litter". This doesn't quite tally with my experience. Drinks litter makes up the largest component of the rural litter I pick up and Coke bottles and cans are by far the most numerous. In a typical sample of 74 cans and bottles I picked up, 21 were from Coca-Cola. The next largest number was Red Bull with 9 items. There's a strong argument that Coca-Cola is the most littered brand in the country.

Walkers Crisps

Forget our native birds, the thing you are most likely to see in a British hedgrow is a Walkers crisp packet. The Walkers plant in Leicestershire churns out 11 million packets per day, that's around 4 billion per year. Given these volumes, it's not surprising that it can feel as if the entire country is littered with Walkers crisppackets.

A study by the Manchester University Business School found that Walkers was the worst littered brand in the city. Researchers visited a selected city centre location 352 times and on 292 of those occassions they found one or more Walkers packets present.

Walkers is owned by Pepsico, so it's a traditional Coke vs Pepsi fight for the award of worst littered brand in the country.

Red Bull

"Red Bull gives you wings." Well, it doesn't give their empty cans wings. The littering of the little red, blue and silver cans is starting to feel like an epidemic. I find myself picking up a large quantity of Red Bull cans, second only in number to Coca-cola cans and bottles. And when I have litter picked an area, a Red Bull can is very often one of the first bits of litter to return. I'm not sure of the reason for this, but their advertising doesn't help. At least two of their witty little cartoons appear to condone littering.

To assess the degree of Red Bull littering I got on my bike. I recently rode a 25km route in the Cotswolds, mostly on small country lanes. En route, I picked up every Red Bull can I came across. At the end of the ride, I had collected a total of 54 of them, that averages out at one every 500m.

Is Red Bull four times more likely to be littered than Coke?

Last year Coca-Cola shipped 1,023 million litres of product through its retail channels (Britvic Soft Drinks Report 2008). We don't know how much Red Bull shipped because it was out of the top 9 brands by volume quoted in the report, but we know it was less than 124 million litres, Lets assume it was 100 million for arguments sake. So I'd expect there to be roughly ten times less Red Bull cans than Coke bottles/cans. But in my unscientific sample of 74 drinks container picked up from the A417 in Gloucestershire (see photo at Why we need a Bottle Bill) there were 9 Red Bull Cans to 21 Coke bottles/cans, a ratio of 1:3. Taking into account volume shipped, these figures seem to indicate a Red Bull can is around 4 times more likely to be littered than a Coke/can bottle. , Even allowing for more Coke being shipped in large bottles through supermarkets and Red Bull's smaller can size, there still appears to be a disproportionately high number of Red Bull cans ending up as litter.

McDonalds- "I'm lovin'it"

But I'm not lovin' the number of their oversized cups with plastic lids and straws that litter roadside verges. On my test mile of lane (see About Rural Litter) I found 18 items of fast food litter, 9 of which were from McDonalds. And it is not unusual to find the packaging from a whole meal strewn a long a verge, i.e. cup, styrofoam burger box, cardboard fries pocket and carrier bag.

To their credit, McDonalds recognises littering as one of the side-effects of their business and does more than most fast food companies to reduce littering in the immediate vicinity of their outlets. However, these initiatives don't have an impact on car borne litter that ends up being deposited on verges and in laybys a number of miles from where it is brought.