Littergram: Cleaning Britain one picture at a time (opens in new tab)

Fix My Street and Report That Pothole were black holes for me. Reports that I would usually send directly to my local authority (East Hants DC / Hampshire CC) were never followed-up. They always are when reported directly.

Love Clean Streets didn't use HTTPS so I deleted my account after noticing. I did get some authority replies from that service, but also about half of the reports were ignored.

The web site reporting pages for both the authorities are easy to use and I always get a reply so I won't waste my time with third-party apps again.

I wasn't aware of Fix My Street, thank you for that.

The reason for bringing it to HN's attention was because I too read about the service on the BBC News website and their plight with Instagram.

I was a little perplexed - it's a British company, operating entirely within the UK - why is Instagram getting involved? The 'gram' prefix has been around for quite a while [citation needed], is it an infringement of trademark? Then again, the company is posting pictures with captions, which is very Instagram-y, so I can see a certain level of cross over.

FixMyStreet do lots of other cool stuff that may be of interest to HN-types.

They have Open311 compatability, which is an open project for standardizing systems like this so they can talk to each other and import/export data directly into council systems (apparently 311 is the standard number you phone in the US to report issues like this).

https://www.fixmystreet.com/open311

And it's a project of MySociety, which builds various other web tools to improve finding information about your local goverment representatives, filing Freedom of Information Act requests etc.

https://www.mysociety.org/about/

"We make websites that empower citizens worldwide"

Thanks - I had no idea that existed:

https://www.fixmystreet.com/

I agree. It's better to just sit here and sulk. Hopefully the problem of litter will just go away.

That said, humans love to copy, so if enough people see you picking up random litter, as I often do too, then they may do the same, as you said, some won't change, but if the 99% of us who don't litter just spend a tiny bit of time picking up the 1%'s trash we all get to live in a clean world! Here's hoping...

Where I live in the UK the issue is rarely a single piece of litter. It's things like lay-bys or roadsides strewn with thousands of pieces of litter (and human faeces, used sanitary/contraceptive products etc). The logistics industry is the biggest offender: lay-bys are used as ad-hoc lorry parks and the local council would have to send out a team several times a week to keep them clean (they do clear them every now and again when enough people complain, but it never takes long for the mess to return since HGVs are parked in these lay-bys 20+ hours a day). They claim to be unable to afford to do this, and seem unwilling to demand that the companies responsible clean up their act.

The second biggest issue is verges and field gates full of old tyres, rubble, old appliances, asbestos and other rubbish that has been dumped. This has been exacerbated recently by the council only opening their waste disposal sites a few days a week, and charging to dispose of most things.