Tidy Roadsides

Client: Starbucks

The UK spends £1 billion every year on cleaning up litter. Roadside litter is especially tough to clear. It’s also damaging to nature: packaging harms wildlife and plastic fragments get into waterways, eventually joining the 80% of all ocean plastics coming from land.

Tidy Roadsides set out to navigate a better way to tackle roadside litter. We partnered with Ellipsis Earth, who used advanced image-capturing technology and AI to map roadside litter in Glasgow and around Cardiff. The surveys covered over 9,800,000 sqm. With the help of AI to process billions of data points, we identified 192,436 littered items, 47 different types of litter, and found roadside litter mostly concentrates at slow-speed locations like junctions, slip roads and roundabouts.

So, we targeted the litter hotspots with behaviour change interventions, making it easier for road users to bin rubbish and more people to be willing to do so. We trialled car-friendly bins, played a catchy jingle on the radio and asked people at car parks to take the challenge of doing a 2-minute tidy of their cars.

Eight weeks later, litter mapping in Glasgow showed that data-driven interventions are four to five times more effective in reducing litter than untargeted interventions. 

We summarised our insights and learnings into four principles that help stakeholders use less time and money to tackle roadside litter. Insights from Tidy Roadsides have helped inform the roadside litter approaches of Welsh Government, businesses, highways agencies and local authorities in Scotland and South Wales.