The filthy truth about fly-tipping

A seagull rises from the end of a narrow street in Eastville, resting its scrawny body on the railings of the M32 as our van bounces and rattles down the road.

“Always a pretty good sign,” says Matt Weaver, 32, nodding at the bird ahead. He leads one of the council’s fly-tipping teams which have the gruelling task of picking up the mountains of waste left abandoned on street corners, down alleys and sometimes just in the middle of the road over the weekends.

It’s just past 6am and our first visit is to a communal bin at the bottom of Heath Street.

The solitary seagull now looks down at Matt and his colleague Craig Norman, 46, as they sift through piles of detritus including rotting food seeping through carrier bags, a torn teddy bear and a rolled up mattress which they fling into their lorry’s cage.

Over the next 20 minutes as we join Stapleton Road we come across fridges left standing in the rain, an entire kitchen broken into bits and left against a wall and a bin liner split on the pavement full of putrid green chicken so vile in its smell that it even has Matt, with his 10 years’ experience, retching and pulling his bright orange shirt over his nose in disgust.

And this is just the start. Over the next few hours we barely make a dent in Easton and Eastville’s mountains of rubbish which seems to grow bigger and bigger every time you turn a corner.

There’s just enough time to make a start on the fly-tipping which attaches itself to every communal bin in the area which seem to work like giant magnets. But on our round we pass fridges, tables and sofas that we can’t even fit in – and wouldn’t even if we could as they are yet to be officially reported.

“People say ‘fuckin ‘el there’s so much fly-tipping in Easton, why don’t the council just pick it up?’ They don’t realise how much we do pick up,” Craig says as we jump back in the truck above a street corner so full of rotting vegetables and stagnant water that the drains are blocked with a green liquid.

Matt and Craig estimate they collect about 12.5 tonnes of fly-tipping a week. But as the only crew for this area, they have a battle on their hands.

“We can just about keep it at this level,” Matt admits as we drive towards Avonmouth to drop the load which is full already after about an hour’s work. “We clear it as best we can but the truth is it’s back again in a few days.”

“Even after a day it just gets a shithole again,” Craig adds.

Most of the fly-tipping around the communal bins come from businesses – mostly takeaways – who either can’t afford or can’t be bothered to dispose of their own waste through a private contractor.

The rest of the waste is larger items dropped in Easton from people in the area and people from outside – some of whom offer rubbish collection services to residents for a few quid only to take it away and leave it on the pavements.

They get away with it because they know they can in Easton, such is the general state of the area. It’s a self-perpetuating problem, not helped by a transient population and an austerity-hit council with a seemingly toothless enforcement team (there were just 11 prosecutions across the whole city last year).

Almost an hour after we leave Easton for the first time this morning we finally reach the Avonmouth dump where we join a queue to empty the truck.

In a giant warehouse thick with a cloud of dust, a tipper truck scrapes up the mixed rubbish and dumps it into articulated lorries waiting to take it to landfill.

I’m momentarily stopped from taking pictures of the whole operation by a man in a tabard who says I don’t have permission from head office. The manager is on the phone within seconds barking orders.

No pictures then? “Especially not of the vibrator,” laughs one of the foremen. Oops. Too late.

An odd item, surely? Not really, as Matt explains back in the truck. One of the team’s most memorable finds was a bag full of vibrators. What a morning that must have been.

And just last week they found a mobility scooter and an entire garage door on the street, just to name a couple of the stranger items which find their way to landfill.

So what do the team think when they hear people moaning that the council don’t come and clean their streets?

“It’s frustration,” Matt says. “I’m in Easton every single day picking up rubbish. But there is some responsibility with the people who live there too.

“If they’re seeing people it’s their responsibility to call us as well. I can’t take everything and I can only take what I see on my sheets.

“There’s things you can do. Take number plates, keep your eye out. The amount of waste we pick up, people are bound to see certain people do certain things. If everybody took the responsibility to report it a bit more then that’s a start. Without people reporting it we can’t do anything else.”

And what’s the reason why the team can’t pick up rubbish that isn’t on their list reported to them by the public? No time. “If we stopped for everything on the streets, we wouldn’t get very far,” Matt laughs.

“You do feel sorry for the people who do try and keep it tidy round here, but there’s only so much they can do. If everybody did it, it would be different. Most people want to put their heads in the sand.

“They think ‘I don’t want no confrontation’. Round here with all the stabbings and violence it’s understandable. But if they could just take a picture out their window or something that would help. They don’t need to approach anyone.”

One of the people who understands how hard the fly-tipping team’s job is is Steve Woods from campaign group Tidy BS5.

“It’s a monumental task. It’s like nailing fog to the wall,” he says.

“But you have to remember, there is only one crew out there. They would get around and it would look cleaner if the council increased the number of teams.

“At the end of the day, we just want to see the place clean and tidy. It’s been two years of campaigning now and Bristol City Council move very, very slowly to make changes. We are rather disappointed to say the least.”

One of the biggest changes the council has made is ditching the previous waste contractors Kier (by “mutual consent”) last year.

The £96-million contract was torn up and a council-owned company – Bristol Waste – was formed to take over the day-to-day operations.

Some pointed the finger at Kier for not hitting landfill reduction targets and others have claimed they were missing basic fly-tipping collection targets – and getting fined every time they did (Kier said they made “good progress in improving service delivery”).

After leaving the fly-tipping round early I head to City Hall to meet Gillian Douglas, the interim service director for green and clean at the council.

She admits the council are still struggling as I ask why fly-tipping collection is not more frequent.

“We have not got the money to sustain the mopping-up exercise. We have to be honest about that. We’re severely constrained financially. We’re still trying to find the money to make savings from this year, so throwing more money at it is not sustainable solution.

“I can understand. If I lived in one of those streets I’d think ‘blinking heck they need to come round every day to clean it up’. But that’s not a sustainable solution.”

So what is a sustainable solution? To Gillian – and to Matt and his team too, to be fair – changes aren’t going to come from more collection teams or more prosecutions.

“People don’t think it’s illegal and unacceptable, but it is. If the change comes anywhere it’s going to come from attitudes. Just because that fly-tipping is not right outside your house, it still affects your neighbourhood.”

She blames businesses for a lot of the worst behaviour as well as private landlords throwing out their previous tenants’ furniture.

The answer is to educate and encourage engagement between enforcement teams and communities to increase reporting and tackle the culture of littering – and Bristol’s new waste company doing what they can to work within the limited budget allocated to them by the council.

Read more: Easton residents mock fly-tipping ‘artwork’