From an artificial leg to a suspender belt – charity reveals the ten weirdest items found littering our streets
Every day, Keep Britain Tidy’s survey team is walking the streets, looking at the litter that we, as a nation, drop – a staggering 30million tonnes of it every year.
The environmental charity does this surveying for an annual report for Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on how clean our country is, the Local Environmental Quality Survey of England (LEQSE).
As you would expect, the charity’s surveyors find millions of cigarette butts, thousands of plastic bottles and crisp packets but, alongside the everyday stuff, the surveyors occasionally find something that stops them in their tracks.
We have pulled together the most unusual and downright odd items that our surveyors have found on their finds around the country.
Top 10
1. A colostomy bag.
2. An artificial limb.
3. Two really large pike, found at the side of a lay-by.
4. Hundreds of limes at the side of the road
5. A ‘rabbit’ toy that would be more at home in a well-known women’s high street store.
6. A bin bag that was split open and full of dog poo!
7. A suspender belt, black lacy bra and pants, on a rural road that only leads to one farm.
8. In a wood, a large grave that was probably for a dog which was very, very spooky!
9. A large collection of adult-only DVDs.
10. A Barbie doll, hung by the neck from a tree with one eye burned out and the rest of the doll slightly charred!
Whilst these items are certainly odd, litter and fly-tipping is a serious issue for England, which blights our nation’s landscape, impacts on our local communities and causes harm to wildlife.
Annually, 30 million tonnes of litter are cleaned from our streets across the country with a cost to local authorities of £1 billion per year.
Chief Executive of Keep Britain Tidy, Phil Barton, said, “The LEQSE survey helps us to assess the environmental cleanliness of the country. It is critical to ensure that government, local authorities, land managers, business and Keep Britain Tidy have the information we need in order to act.
“Some of the items found by our surveyors are quite weird, but these finds highlight the bigger issue of littering and fly tipping in particular. We all want to be able to access clean places around us, so we all have a responsibility to put our rubbish in a bin or take it home with us.”