BEERCANS & CIGARETTES
Elly Abraham-Leckie
BEERCANS & CIGARETTES BY ELLY ABRAHAM-LECKIE
BEERCANS & CIGARETTES Littering has always been an issue, laziness being the main reason for this. Cheltenham is predominantly a student town, and students are stereotypically the laziest type of person. This project is looking into the littering problems Cheltenham has in three locations of the town. St. Pauls’, the Town Centre, and Montpellier. Using GPS coordinates as a way of geocaching the litter found and which location has the most. Each of the items of litter photographed takes anything from a few weeks to hundreds of years to decompose. A beer-can takes up to 500 years, a plastic bottle up to 450 years and a cigarette filter up to 10 years. Most of the items of litter seen here could be recycled and used again, instead of spending years rotting away. Along with harming our environment, we are also impacting on the local wild animals. They see our left overs and the rubbish on the ground and think they can eat it, harming themselves and possibly sending it back to us again with the bacteria they contract. Hopefully these images will make you think about how much you are harming the environment and effecting our future before doing it again.
ST. PAULS’ 51.907028, -2.079140 St. Pauls’ is the residential area of Cheltenham, most of the people living here are students and working-class families (these people tend to be quite eclectic when it comes to littering, and the future.) There is obvious amount of bins, yet they’re hardly used, there’s litter next to the bins, instead of in them.
51.907681, -2.081426
51.907628, -2.081409
51.907633, -2.081333
51.907649, -2.081583
51.908215, -2.079047
51.907949, -2.077944
51.908095, -2.076822
51.907223, -2.078007
51.907084, -2.078115
51.906228, -2.076822
51.906199, -2.076818
51.906249, -2.076892
51.905113, -2.074237
51.904972, -2.074006
51.904766, -2.074760
TOWN CENTRE 51901309, -2.075127 The town centre is where all the shops and fast food restaurants are, having hundreds of people walking through every day. There are plenty of bins to deposit litter into, and most mornings street cleaners parade around doing their best to curb the littering epidemic. Despite this, there is still litter, yet a different kind to what was seen before. Fast food wrappers and objects that have been left behind. All just as bad for the environment as the last, also causing health concerns due to the vermin attracted by the discarded food.
51.898097, -2.096229
51.901266, -2.084741
51.900269, -2.066377
51.900262, -2.066313
51.902350, -2.076381
51.900293, -2.075287
51.900864, -2.075065
51.898674, -2.080109
51.898891, -2.081026
MONTPELLIER 51.895387, -2.08230 Montpellier is the more luxurious area of Cheltenham; the houses are bigger and the people wealthier. This does not affect their littering though; the same type of litter was found here as well as the previous two locations, sometimes worse. Comparing this section of images to St. Pauls’ you start to see the variety of types of litter. The same number of bins are available, which have been used a lot more than St. Pauls’. No matter who you are or where you live, littering is epidemic problem.
51.895575, -2.080169
51.895480, -2.079862
51.894242, -2.080443
51.894668, -2.082143
51.894770, -2.081660
51.894309, -2.080300
51.894418, -2.080235
51.894539, -2.083327
51.895453, -2.082604
51.895335, -2.082789
51.897247, -2.082351