Some details on littering

I posted recently about the amount of litter on the roadsides in this area (ie Widgiewa, Captains Flat  and Briars-Sharrow Roads.  The catalyst for that was extending some of our dog walks to the intersection of Widgiewa with Captains Flat Rd (CFR).

It appears to me that the situation has got worse at that area, in terms of it looking like an outpost of the Bungendore tip on a windy day, since the original post.  So today I took myself off there to do a bit of more rigorous assessment.

The area I chose to clean up was 55m long (from the 70 speed limit sign in Widgiewa Rd to the bitumen of CFR) and was about 2m wide on each side of the road.  So that makes it 220 sqm in area. The area is illustrated in this image.

The speed limit sign is on the brow of the hill, marked by A.  (I will get to 'B' later.)

I picked up 143 bits of litter, ranging in size from a take-away ketchup container to a large (1m square) lump of coreflute.  I didn't pick up the broken car battery, but if it is still visible will do when next I go to the tip.  Overall I filled two plastic potting mix bags (~55 l in total) with non-recyclable crud and about 1/3rd filled another 30 l bag with recyclable stuff.

Macro-crap like this is easy to deal with.

Unfortunately this was more typical, with many small fiddly items, rather difficult to pick up wearing very heavy duty gloves.

I also noted the salient characteristics of what I picked up.  This is summarised in the following image (I haven't included the car battery in this).

I'll return briefly to point B in the first image.  That is the school bus shelter, but I don't attach much weight to the kids as a source of litter because:

• the area closer to the shelter didn't have much litter; and 
• most of the items (see image below) are not the sort of things school kids would buy.

Although I have seen tradies parked in this area (presumably phoning ahead to their next job) I can't imagine that they would be installing kit after a liquid lunch courtesy of Carlton United.  Well, I hope not.

So who are the sociopaths who dump muck over our area?  I can only conclude it is people passing through, either going to ride trail bikes in Tallaganda or just on the way from here to there.

What can be done about it?

• Putting up some "tosser" posters (see earlier post) may help, (although possibly the guilty parties would see "tosser" as a compliment).  
• I wonder if a couple of strategic signs mentioning security cameras would be effective?  
• Would Palerang Shire be able (not to mention willing) to prosecute people if the signs were actually accompanied by cameras and they captured lowlifes dumping crud?