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In the issue of Gibraltar Business published at the end of last summer, our foreword
editorial commented on the need to instil a sense of orgullo llanito or sense of pride
we have as a community. It was an appeal to those those who read the article that we
all needed to take some responsibility for the state of general cleanliness around town.
Either nobody read it or maybe those who did thought is wasn’t that important. And
here we are, another nine months later with streets that are filthy and a townscape which
looks unlovedand uncared for.
And yet, one thing appears certain: many locals are still keen to complain about the
continued filthy state of our streets with litter strewn on pavements and roads, but as
a community we are still not sufficiently bothered to do anything collectively about it.
Yes, the usual keyboard warriors are quick to take to social media to complain about
another pile of rubbish on Main Street or the detritus which has been left behind after
an impromptu late night barbecue in Rosia. But the rubbish piles up and the dirty streets
remain.
Now the Government has stepped in. It has increased the fines for littering substantially
from £70 to £250 and to £1,000 for littering dangerous materials. Will this make a
difference? Time will tell but with only a handful of wardens to enforce the new fines it
does not really address the real problem: taking responsibility and making sure that we
all put our rubbish in bin stores or in the waste bins where it can be collected instead of
leaving it abandoned on the street.
In a community which has demonstrated such a tight cohesion on other issues as we did
with the 2016 EU referendum or on joint sovereignty in 2003, why is it so hard to agree
that we do not want to live in filth? This should be something we can all agree on and it
is something which we should all take responsibility for.
The Environmental Safety Group’s Clean up the World campaign has been doing
sterling work for years and shows the amount of rubbish which is thrown away carelessly
each year. The Nautilus Project also has regular clean ups of beaches and the shorelines
around Gibraltar and each time they amass huge amounts of discarded items which
should have been put in waste bins.
But it is not enough for these two groups along with Britannia and the GCIS to pick up
all of the litter and rubbish which Gibraltar generates each year. This is an issue which
affects everyone and so should involve everyone. It should not take the threat of higher
fines to persuade us to dispose of our litter in a responsible manner. We should do this
as a matter of course