No wonder Brighton and Hove City Council failed to find anyone to advertise on its bins. Aside from the obvious branding problems of being the company everyone associates with dog-doings, masticated chewing gum and free newspapers (*shudder*), I doubt they’d get any exposure. Nobody is using the damned things!

If I were out to prove myself as a true local, I would heap the lion’s share of the blame on those dreaded outsiders. Those visiting pleasure-seekers termed ‘Londoners’ in the same peculiar way 1930’s Californians called everyone displaced by the dustbowls an ‘Okie’. They shuffle into town, empty their pockets, puke outside a Wetherspoons and shuffle back out again.

Well, that’s not an entirely fictitious account of a Brighton day-trip, but I’m not going to make the mistake of attributing the sharp increase in weekend waste to the presence of outsiders. I’m pretty certain that when the working week is done it’s not just the visiting Crawley girls who want to have fun. People head out of their homes, have a good time, cities become messy. It’s a fact of city life.

It’s just that, Brighton residents have never seemed particularly in tune with the unique, dirt-smearing properties of their blustery coastal town. From the student house which still doesn’t understand the subtleties of separating recycled glass to the seagull perforated bin-bags which greet every waste collector, we’re a place of little common sense.

No city has quite the same problem with takeaways, as far as I can see. Stick an urban area this close to the coast and it grows an alarming number of fish and chip restaurants, all the while making sure there are enough mystery-meat restaurants to cater to the drunkenly hungry. These places naturally generate a worrying amount of waste, the typical patron inspired by the lack of plates and cutlery to drop a mound of dead trees on the pavement. People, use a bin or get food delivered to your home, there are enough of them that provide such a service!

Oh, but we have a clean conscience at least. The first Green MP, a Green majority in the council and a shiny new Green Mayor. Meanwhile, local residents try their best to pepper the London Road area with pooch poo in some kind of obtuse display of the city’s free-spirited attitude: there’s surely nothing greener than fertilising the weeds and wildflowers of our decaying suburbia after all.

And now I’m starting to wonder whether we’re not merely paying lip-service to environmental ideals. Perhaps we don’t have a Green majority in the council because we’re a progressive, liberal city. Perhaps we voted Green because they’re the closest we can get to electing our mothers to pick up after us.

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