Litter being left overnight to show extent of problem -- CCC
12 December 2003
To illustrate the extent of littering in Christchurch the City Council
will delay its early morning central city clean-up tomorrow Saturday morning
(13 December).
Mayor Garry Moore believes the answer to the problem of litter
is not the Council spending more money to clean it up.
“
Councillors and I are getting increasing numbers of complaints
about litter, asking what we’re going to do about it. We’re
going to leave the usual clean-up for a couple of hours on Saturday to show
two things: how much is already done to keep the city clean and just how
much stuff is being dropped."
Council contractors normally work around midnight until about
7.30am during the week, and from midnight to 9.30am over the
weekends. On Friday
night, no more cleaning will be done after 4pm and the contractors
will not return until around 9.30am on Saturday morning.
“
The point is simple: if it wasn’t dropped in the first place, we wouldn’t
need to be cleaning it up,” the Mayor says. “For something that’s
easily preventable, it’s very expensive. Just to sweep up we’re
already paying about $280,000 a year. For that amount of money, we could
build something like a new skate park every year.
“
We don’t want to be preaching about this, but I think we all need
to start taking responsibility for what is a community problem. A lot of
this stuff can be recycled and there are recycling bins in the central city.”
City Council staff report that the problem is not confined
to the central city. In recent years there has been growing
demand for regular cleaning up of litter along suburban streets.
This service is
in addition
to the regular gutter sweeping.
Yani Johanson, chairperson of Keep Christchurch Beautiful,
supports the idea of encouraging people to be responsible. "The best way of
keeping our city beautiful is to not make it messy,” he says. “As
residents, we all have a duty to help make our city clean by disposing
of our litter properly and encouraging others to do the same. This campaign
gets people to think about the impact of their behaviour on our environment,
and, hopefully, make positive decisions as a result."
- Tonight’s initiative is supported by the Central City Mayoral
Forum and the Central City Revitalisation Project – at www.ccc.govt.nz/centralcity/ on the web
- To encourage personal responsibility, the City Council is resurrecting
the “Would you still do it if it had your name on it” campaign
and thanks Colenso BBDO for allowing it to use images from Auckland
Regional Council’s Big Clean Up
- Groups which volunteer to clean up public spaces can get free rubbish
bags or coupons for dumping from the City Council. Ph 941 8830
- Some people tell the Council that the charges at Transfer Stations
is a problem. In fact, it is free for up to three of the Council’s
black bags a week
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