Compared with the obvious environmental issues we hear about every day, littering often takes a backseat-but it's more pressing than we may think.
Some may say that a banana peel out of your car along the motorway would be a harmless action. Actually，they are wrong. A banana peel can take up to two years to decompose (分解), and with a third of motorists admitting to littering while driving, that's a whole lot of discarded banana peels, or much worse. An orange peel and a cigarette butt has a similar biodegrading (生物降解)term to that of a banana, but tin and aluminum cans last up to 100 years; and plastic bottles last forever, so do glass bottles and plastic bags.
Despite the fact that longer-lasting materials will serve to damage the environment and its animals for longer, we can't only measure the severity of a certain type of rubbish by its lifetime. For example, despite having a fairly short biodegrading span, more than 120 tons of cigarette-related litter is thrown away in the UK every day. Similarly, our regular littering here and there has caused the UK's mouse population to increase by 60 million. This suddenly isn't so mysterious when you consider that since the 1960s our annual littering has increased by an amazing 500 per cent.
It's not a cheap habit either: UK taxpayers spent £500 million on keeping the streets clean.
So, it's not surprising that if caught fly-tipping, you could face a f20, 000 fine. Regardless of how severe the punishment might seem, however, among the reported cases only 2, 000 were punished out of 825, 000, so we still have some way to go in making sure people observe the rules.
To take back our beautiful cities, we need to do more than simply not leaving rubbish where it ought not to be. We need to care more about the world around us.