Liverpool’s Business Improvement District (BID) is hosting a special awareness week urging the public and businesses to Love Where You Live.
The week is aimed at drawing attention to environmental issues affecting the city centre such as gum, cigarette litter, begging and pigeons.
The campaign is part of City Central BID’s role as a Love Where You Live Ambassador with Keep Britain Tidy with support from Liverpool City Council, the city’s cleansing contractors Amey and Merseyside Police.
Keep Britain Tidy, who have recently launched an anti-gum campaign with Liverpool City Council, estimate that street cleansing alone costs the UK taxpayer more than £1bn a year.
City Central BID surveyed the public and found eight out of 10 people consider the city centre as clean – and are aiming for 10 out of 10 in the 2014 survey.
The organisation, which represent 630 businesses in the retail heart of the city centre will use each day of the week to highlight a particular topic and issue polls on a whole range of topics such as the proposed 5p charge on shopping bags to £80 fines for dropping gum.
Williamson Square will be used to animate the campaign with road shows and activities and will also feature new signage asking people not to feed pigeons.
Ian Ward, Chairman of City Central BID, said: “We all want Liverpool city centre to be as welcoming as possible and we all have a role to play – as individuals and businesses.
“We know our members consider the environment as their number one issue. This Love Where You Live Week is about educating people about how we all benefit from a cleaner city centre – environmentally and financially.”
Councillor Steve Munby, city council cabinet member for living environment and localism, said: “We all have a part to play in keeping Liverpool clean and tidy. This week will focus attention on some of the key issues involved and what can be done to ensure that people really show they love where they live.”
Helen Bingham, Communications and PR Manager at Keep Britain Tidy, said: ”It’s great to see cities like Liverpool encouraging the public to take pride in their environment. We all have a role to play be it government, businesses and as individuals to treat our neighbourhoods with respect and understand that littering in any form really is a waste – of time and money.”
Liverpool and litter – some facts:
Liverpool
• Liverpool is 5th most visited city in UK by overseas visitors
• More than a million people walk through the city centre every week
• City’s visitor economy is worth £2bn a year supporting more than 40,000 jobs
Litter
• About £1bn a year is spent by local authorities in England on street cleaning and litter clearance – equivalent to a billion free school dinners or 33,200 nurses
• 62% of people in England drop litter, although only 28% admit to it
• 30 million tonnes of litter are dropped on UK’s streets every year – enough to fill 4 Wembley stadiums
Ciggarette butts
• An estimated 122 tonnes of cigarette butts – 200 million of them – matchsticks and cigarette related litter is dropped every day across the UK
• 23% of smokers admit to dropping their cigarette butts on the ground
• Cigarette butts are made of cellulose acetate, which takes up to 12 years to biodegrade
Pigeons
• Europe’s pigeon population is estimated to be approx. 28 million, with high densities in the centre of major towns and cities
• An estimated 100,000 pairs of breeding urban gulls are on rooftops around town and cities across the UK
• It takes Liverpool’s street cleansing team 80+ staff hours per day to clean droppings from streets and buildings, at a cost of £100,000 + a year
Chewing gum
• On average, a piece of chewing gum costs about 3 pence, but the cost of removal is about 10 pence per piece
• Wrigley say chewing gum is used by 28 million people in the UK
• The average person chews over 300 sticks of gum each year and most chewing gum is purchased between Halloween and Christmas
Begging
• It is estimated 80 per cent of people begging do so to support a drug habit and 40% will not be homeless
• An operation in Birmingham in autumn 2013 showed that six out of ten people arrested for begging had a home
• In Liverpool, several charities are dedicated to supporting the homeless such as The Whitechapel centre and The Basement all of whom need your support
