In Japan, people litter extremely rarely in public space. However in Germany and Europa it becomes an increasing problem.
A study from Humboldt University Berlin - published in 2018 - explored aspects of “perceived cleanliness and reasons for littering”. Their results point our that internal reasons such as laziness or lack of education are mostly assumed to be the cause of littering behavior. More occasionally, external reasons were also mentioned. e.g. wastebaskets not visible or full.
Most of the time, people who litter justify their behavior with situational circumstances, which often do not apply. The majority of people littering, aged between 18-30, are throwing items such as cigaret butts and take-away packagings. (Wahrnehmung von Sauberkeit und Ursachen von Littering. YKU Verlag, 2018)
So what can be done to improve peoples behavior? Positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions are hypothesized to help as well as improvement of subjective and objective aspects of cleanliness.
Inspired by our cleaning session at TRAFFFIC and with “Greenbird” in Kyoto we invited people to join us cleaning our street, located in Neukölln - this district is known for its liveliness, its cultural diversity, but also but for its higher poverty, unemployment and crime rate. It also has a huge littering problem as rubbish can be found on streets, playgrounds and parks in substantial amounts.
This invitation generated a lot of positive feedback on social media and brought together a fair group of volunteers.
In two hours we filled four shopping cars with rubbish, but unfortunately only managed to clean a third of the street. We were literally overwhelmed by the amount of rubbish. While cigaret butts, candy, crisps and drinks packages (e.g. Capri-Sun) where among the most recurrent, we also faced much bigger items like TV screens, shopping cars and even a poker table.
Passing by pedestrians were all in all very curious expressing confusion as well as thankfulness. Objectively the street was visibly much cleaner but unfortunately the impact of our action did not last long, as within 12 hours the sidewalk was already strewn with packaging waste.
The action of cleaning itself felt empowering and created a feeling of community between participants, however due to the short-term outreach it was not experienced as a fully rewarding activity
