31 tonnes of rubbish collected from just two stretches of road

And that's over just two months of this year. As Britain's roads become increasingly litter-clogged, John Evans looks at what can be done

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle..." Even filthy London streets couldn't put Shakespeare off his stride, but were the bard to be catapulted to 2023 and find himself wandering along the side of the M25, or any major UK road, would he describe this country in similar terms?

Probably not. Our litter-strewn verges are a disgrace, but even worse is the fact that, save for a few hardy members of the public with plastic bags and nerves of steel, no one does much about it. Actually, that's not entirely true. My local litter group's Facebook page carries a couple of pop-ups from the council proclaiming how its highways squads were in action over five days on the A3 and A331, when they gathered 1000kg of litter and 17,360kg of debris. That was in February. A month later they were out again on the A3 alone and harvested 1460kg of litter and 11,060kg of debris.

There are no national figures for the quantity of roadside litter and rubbish, although a report by the Council for the Protection of Rural England in 2020 estimated that clearing it up costs taxpayers around £850 million a year. According to National Highways, which is responsible for motorways, much of the rubbish its teams have to deal with is food packaging, but fly-tipping of household and construction rubbish is a growing problem, as are carelessly tied-down skiploads that release those endless, grey plastic streamers you see in hedges.