Litter - Petition For Printing of Number Plates on Drive Thru Packages

rob_fmttm

Administrator

Mandatory printing of car registration numbers on all Drive Thru packaging.​

I would like to get all Drive Thru retailers to be required to print car registrations on all take away packaging. Hopefully, to cut down on the amount of litter that is blighting roadsides all over the country.
We have been talking about just how much take away litter is floating around the verges and edgelands at the moment - this a petition starting up to try ensure that number plates are printed on take away packaging. It may well stop some of the appalling littering we are seeing of late.
 
It should be on all takeaway services, all click and collect receipts, stamped on the boxes and the damn products.

Yes, thats a logistical nightmare, but I agree, we have to do something.
 
What if they give a "fake" number plate?

Maybe at drive thru's it would work like McDonalds, but what if you ordered a takeaway went in the shop.. told them a fake plate and then walked out?
 
sounds like a great idea, but one I imagine the fast food outlets have absolutely zero interest in doing as they are effectively grassing up their customer base.

stiffer penalties for littering and a fast food tax (which will 100% be passed on to the consumer) to pay for picking it all up would be a start.

The fast food joints are only paying lip service to the issue and are swerving their responsibility to the wider society rather than just a portion of their customer base who dont give a $hit.

All Mc D drive through have cameras in the order points anyway, so the technology is there already.
 
You take your rubbish and put it in a bin then some idiot decided to empty the bin and throw rubbish all over place do you still get a fine. Idiots for some reason are already empty dog bins and throwing the poo bags. Sorry will never work
 
There is surely even less chance of quickly bringing in a fast food tax. I don't think they would be grassing up anyone because the customer should not be throwing the packaging away.
 
What if they give a "fake" number plate?

Maybe at drive thru's it would work like McDonalds, but what if you ordered a takeaway went in the shop.. told them a fake plate and then walked out?
It is for Drive Thru's. If you look around they make up a vast amount of the litter mountain that is ever growing this year.
 
You take your rubbish and put it in a bin then some idiot decided to empty the bin and throw rubbish all over place do you still get a fine. Idiots for some reason are already empty dog bins and throwing the poo bags. Sorry will never work
That's a good point Kosovo about the bin! - and i've seen rubbish fly out of bins when it's windy....
 
Thanks Rob, have signed.

There will be people who would rather park round the corner and walk in so they don't have to give their car reg and have to actually take their litter home, but hopefully this will go some way to addressing the problem.

Littering should carry a £500 fine. These selfish tvvats would soon realise that using a bin isn't all that difficult.
 
The way to go might be to start charging the fast food companies for the clean up costs. That'd hopefully give them an incentive to help sort the situation out.
 
Would you expect every drive thru outlet to install printers in their facilities to print the numbers on?

So you go to the drive thru to collect 2 burgers, 2 chips, two cokes which all come in a bag - so 9 different bits of potential litter that all need to have the car reg number printed on?

Or you just print the number on the bag and the bag gets emptied on the floor?

Or more realistically the bit of the bag with the car reg on gets ripped off the bag and the bag gets dumped.

Even more realistically is that even if the litter did have a car reg on it there's absolutely no way that councils have the resources to follow up on every bit of litter that is thrown out of a car window.

Councils dont have the resources to manage littering now.

What about non drive thru outlets, are they exempt?

What about cyclist/pedestrians who get take aways from the multitude of outlets that are predominant everywhere - are they exempt from it?

Sorry but its totally impracticable.
 
Have a look a bit closer at litter, as I have been, you will find people are throwing all of their McDonalds onto the ground. And McDonalds is a really high percentage of rubbish.
There is no one simple answer - lots of school kids are dumping their sweets/crisps outside school. Lots of parents are dumping contents out of cars when picking up their kids. Lots of dog walkers are dumping their bags of dog poo. Lots of drivers are throwing their coffee cups out of their windows.
But this Drive Thru number plate printing would really help, believe me. The big chains can well afford this and their packaging is making up a larger and larger percentage of the mountain of rubbish.
 
If you looked in last week - you will see how 2 of us filled 7 bin bags on Good Friday (in just over an hour) and so much of it was McDonalds and KFC dumped into the verge from people that had bought from the nearby Teesside Park Drive Thrus. They parked up near Tees Barrage and then just lobbed every single thing out of the car onto the verge where it piled up and spilled over the embankment. That is happening in so many parcels of green in our edgeland and destroying it.
It is also causing a fire hazard - as other people are coming along and using that litter to start or accelerate fires in scrub. The fire brigade last week thanked the Billingham litter pickers because their efforts in woodland is reducing fire damage/risk. Not so in Berwick Hills where this week large parts of the nature reserve have been torched and destroyed and all the litter and indeed fly tipping has literally fanned those flames.
It is going to take a mammoth effort to clean all this up - but we have to start somewhere and those thoughtless people buying their McD's and then lobbing them into a hedge is a good place to make a real difference.
 
It needs to go further than this. What if you had to take your own reusable containers to the takeaway, then there would be no need at all for the fast food retailers to produce any packaging. Bring back tupperware!
 
Have a look a bit closer at litter, as I have been, you will find people are throwing all of their McDonalds onto the ground. And McDonalds is a really high percentage of rubbish.
There is no one simple answer - lots of school kids are dumping their sweets/crisps outside school. Lots of parents are dumping contents out of cars when picking up their kids. Lots of dog walkers are dumping their bags of dog poo. Lots of drivers are throwing their coffee cups out of their windows.
But this Drive Thru number plate printing would really help, believe me. The big chains can well afford this and their packaging is making up a larger and larger percentage of the mountain of rubbish.
Answer the question I put in my post then Rob?
 
I agree that it is impractical to chase up every item, but it would be a nudge to many that actually, what they're doing is not 100% anonymous and that they are leaving behind a link to them.

I would love to see some kind of scheme where people were given some kind of voucher/payment for collecting bagged bottles/cans and delivering them to municipal waste centres. It works wonders at music festivals but as a council employee myself, I know it would fail because of the "Ooh, but what if..." culture which goes way beyond actual H&S rules.
 
Every takeout container should be bio degradable but turbo charged. Get colleges and unis involved with grants to design containers that degrade into the ground within say a week. With the sole aim of having these available within 18 months for every business.

Nothing plastic at all should come from takeouts after said containers are lainched, ban it immediately, never mind phasing it out, just ban it outright. Any business caught using plastic takeout containers is fined £10,000 on the spot no ifs or buts.

Scruffy gits at the bottom of Roseberry Topping are some of the worst, not only can they not park a vehicle to save their lives, where they have dumped their car after they have left they've dumped their rubbish too.
 
People just don't care now, it's someone else's problem.

Look at the amount of people who put their bins out 24 hours early, lids not shut down properly and rubbish not bagged so as soon as the wind gets up it blows everywhere - they don't care, someone else's problem. Rubbish in the street, so what, it'll blow away or someone else will pick it up.

Walking the dog a few weeks back I noticed a bin outside a house, a cat or dog had ripped open a bag after something and spilled potatoes and carrot peelings and other stuff (quite a bit) in front of the wall at the front of the house.

I walked the same way 4 or 5 days later and it was all still there. The scruffy ***** won't even clean up outside their own hose. It was on the pavement so not their problem anymore.
 
Would you expect every drive thru outlet to install printers in their facilities to print the numbers on?

So you go to the drive thru to collect 2 burgers, 2 chips, two cokes which all come in a bag - so 9 different bits of potential litter that all need to have the car reg number printed on?

Or you just print the number on the bag and the bag gets emptied on the floor?

Or more realistically the bit of the bag with the car reg on gets ripped off the bag and the bag gets dumped.

Even more realistically is that even if the litter did have a car reg on it there's absolutely no way that councils have the resources to follow up on every bit of litter that is thrown out of a car window.

Councils dont have the resources to manage littering now.

What about non drive thru outlets, are they exempt?

What about cyclist/pedestrians who get take aways from the multitude of outlets that are predominant everywhere - are they exempt from it?

Sorry but its totally impracticable.
DCI - the McDonalds bags are absolutely everywhere - printing the number plate on the bags might just make some people stop and think. Then again the if the fines payable for dumping a bag were paid into a fund it would employ people to find and clear up. They tend to be thrown in much the same places again and again and again. Take a look in one of these hotspots to see the size of the problem. If you were stick a camera there you would see the drivers pulling over, eating and then winding down their windows.
 
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