What a disgrace

6:37am Wednesday 7th May 2008

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THIS picture was taken in an otherwise idyllic spot along Lancaster Canal, where Burrow Beck plunges down a tunnel some 25 feet under the canal.

Because the tunnel is underwater, floating debris gets trapped - and how sad it is that the debris is almost entirely empty plastic bottles. Thousands of them, accumulated ten deep.

The tiny stream is one of hundreds that empty into the Bay, few of which have the means to stop this colossal amount of rubbish ending up there.

Please feel ashamed if you ever threw a bottle or plastic bag into the street, because the chances are it will end up in a stream like this.

It's common knowledge that plastic bottles pollute but it's perhaps less well known that plastic particulates are now entering the marine food chain - that's shrimps and cockles to you and I.

My question is what selfish people do this And how do we make them stop? It's bad enough that we are fighting a losing battle to clean up this kind of filth but the worst of it is that when it is cleaned up the same offenders trash the spot again.

Almost everyone I know is appalled that the city council doesn't step up the handing out of fixed penalty notices for litter. If the number of litter notices handed out was just one tenth of the number of parking tickets maybe we'd start to see some change.

I invite other readers outraged at the amount of filth dumped in our neighbourhoods and along our highways to submit their own photographs of litter hotspots to the Citizen (or tell me the place and I'll show up with my camera and take snaps).

Maybe then we'll start to shame the blighted neighbourhoods and those littering individuals who pollute them.

Maybe then we can shame, too, the filthy car owners who jettison their trash into verge, hedge and field.

Maybe then we can shame the city council into making some real effort to enforce the law to tackle the fly dumpers and mindless littering idiots the rest of us have to put up with.

And maybe then we can start to feel proud of our district once again and not feel ashamed every time we meet a visitor.