Do fines lighten the litter load?
Wellington City litterers are in for more than seal slaps and bird poop if the Council pass new laws to allow fines of up to $400 for worst offenders. The Wellington City Council (WCC) are catching up with Hutt City Council (HCC) laws which already have a scale of fines starting at $100 for offences such as dropping cigarette butts and food containers on a street. Porirua City Council manager of environmental standards Jim Sutton says his council has a quite different system. ?We issue invoices for the servicing it takes to clean up peoples littering, the reports, the checking and the final clean up. ?We also have the ability to prosecute the worst offenders, but it normally doesn?t come to that,? says Mr Sutton. He says they can hand out invoices up to $400 dollars, and have issued three or four of these hefty fines in the past five months. ?We have had instances of fines building up to thousands of dollars, but in these cases the perpetrators, mainly in construction and industrial areas, have cleaned up the mess. ?We have given out about 30 invoices in the past 5 months, and we get a lot of complaints but it?s not always possible to charge people over them,? he says. Mr Sutton says Porirua City has a very efficient recycling and rubbish collection system, and most littering arises from ?slackness?. ?We work closely with Housing New Zealand because many of their properties? border reserves and that has worked to stop most littering.? HCC environmental investigation officer Alan Pope says discarded cigarette butts are the most littered item in New Zealand, and the HCC are encouraging people to have reusable ?pocket size? ash-trays to avoid $100 fines. Mr Pope is the lone enforcement officer for the Hutt and over a 12 month period investigated 309?dumping /littering incidents, of which 56 warnings were given?and 13 infringement notices issued.? ?People are putting household rubbish in with the recyclables. It?s a misuse of the system, and we are trying to crack down on this behaviour. ?We need to raise awareness of the plastic problem, especially people dumping plastic bags. ?It?s primarily laziness, and that?s not good enough in New Zealand,? says Mr Pope. The WCC strategy and policy committee are deciding on the rule changes, and if passed they will come into effect on August 1.
