A team of workers from Cityclean cleared 18 tonnes of rubbish from the A27 Brighton bypass over five nights.
The road is the responsibility of Highways England, not Brighton and Hove City Council, so Cityclean – the council’s rubbish and recycling service – needed permission for the mission.
The council said: “A clean-up of the A27 earlier this month by our Cityclean team removed 18 tonnes of litter, fly tip and silt from the road.
“The clean-up took place over five nights, finishing on Tuesday 4 October. It covered the central reservation and verges on the five miles of road between Dyke Road and Falmer.
“The work takes place overnight to take advantage of lighter traffic.
“Keeping the A27 free of litter is a tricky task to organise and costly due to the need to co-ordinate with Highways England.
“As a national trunk road, the A27 is owned by Highways England. Maintenance of the road and management of the central reservations is their responsibility.
“Councils along the route are responsible for removing litter from verges, while Highways England are responsible for cutting back the vegetation and strimming the grass.
“This means councils usually need to co-ordinate with Highways England’s contractors for litter picks to take place during other maintenance work.
“Councils receive no funding for clearing verges and have to pay Highways England’s contractors for the necessary road closures.
“As well as being expensive, it often proves impractical and can mean many parts of the road going without clean-ups for long periods.
“If verges are strimmed before litter is cleared, the shredded litter and plastic becomes too small to collect and becomes embedded in the soil.
“This affects not only the surrounding wildlife and flora but also the water table and later the sea.”
Council leader Phélim Mac Cafferty said: “I’d like to thank the Cityclean team for their efforts working overnight to clear up the A27. Removing 18 tonnes of rubbish is a staggering amount for a five-mile stretch of road.”
Councillor Mac Cafferty said: “We’ve been asking for a change to the current set up for who is responsible for cleaning the national trunk roads.
“At present, sadly, the city council has no control arranging access to the highways and we’re not even seen as a priority. This doesn’t make sense and makes it very difficult, costly and takes too long to clean the verges.
“National Highways could factor the clear up into their existing work schedules and make efficiencies by timing the cleaning at the same time. That would make the operation much smoother and keep the verges cleaner.
“Keeping verges clean and litter-free is everyone’s responsibility. As well as being an eyesore, litter on the roads endangers wildlife and pollutes the environment.
“Please don’t throw rubbish out of the vehicle window. Take all your rubbish home and make sure any loads on your vehicles are secured.”
“Councils receive no funding for clearing verges” : not true
Oh dear, such greenwash double-speak, again! And such a lack of common-sense, as well as more questions raised!
So what constitutes “verges”?
Most readers will know that the A27 by-pass is bordered by steep-ish embankments or cuttings – so did they get fully-cleaned, right up to the boundary fences (which might require special hillside equipment, and/or extra safety ropes etc for litter-pickers clearing those steep slopes)?
And what percentage of the collected tonnage was silt? Wet silt weighs a lot more than waste paper, with silt clearance (from drainage pits?) being more of a duty for National Highways than for City taxpayers, surely? Hardly any drivers’ll be throwing ‘silt’ out of the window as ‘litter’, it seems?
Ah yes; praise for the Cityclean teams – so what forms of a premium were offered as an inducement for that hazardous overnight work? With how many regular Cityclean services then suffering a lack of staff, due to the night-owls team resting at home, and/or recovering from minor sprains and injuries etc? And how many working-hours were lost beforehand in conducting daylight field training sessions, to qualify operators for that hazardous night-time work?
So now for the common-sense part: given that there are already professional experienced contractors engager to mow and to strim the ‘verges’, and to fully clear the central reservations, then the most cost-effective and operationally efficient solution seems to be for BHCC to pay for expansion of that contract to also include litter-picking ahead of the mowing? Possibly with BHCC providing bulk bins to the contractors, and disposing of all the waste that gets collected?
And whilst speaking of waste and the City Council’s abysmal record on recycling it’s worth bearing in mind that even those meagre figures are artificially inflated by our Council’s wasting City taxpayers money, by tolerating the late-night dumping of glass bottles by hospitality venues in the street bins which we residents fund for the recycling of just our own domestic waste! By law businesses are required to pay for collection of their waste by a licensed Trade Waste contractor!
One also wonders if another heinous ‘gaming’ of tonnages is still continuing?
That is (or was) the decision forced upon CityParks that henceforth all arising of green waste from our parks would be trucked to Stanmer Park for bulk composting (with the resulting compost being trucked back down to the parks to use!).
For decades the practice had been for all green waste to be composted (and then used) in the park where it arose – with the gardeners responsible for a given park taking a professional pride in the quality of the compost they made on site! Indeed, closed-loop recycling of the very best kind – but wrecked by City council officers wanting to lie about tonnages, and recklessly wasting taxpayers money to do so!
When we on the outside can see these ‘wrongs’just why are a majority of our elected Councillors so slow to blow the whistle, if at all? Just what retributions have they been threatened with by Town Hall officers?
Or do we have to hope that the Spring 2023 municipal elections will bring in some new (independent?) Councillors with sufficient backbone to ensure that our officers understand at long last that they are paid to serve, and not to rule?
So why have they not cleaned the section from Dyke Road to Southwick Tunnel?
Thanks for cleaning, keep going, there’s plenty of litter everywhere.
With dashcams becoming more common they should set up a scheme where footage can be shared of vehicles disposing of litter.
£50 a pop should be a deterrent.
Meanwhile, weeds flourish on the pavements…