I often hear the expression 'only stupid people litter”. When I discuss with someone how to deal with littering and how to prevent it, I normally compare the scenario with a family. Because to be honest, the society is nothing else than one big family.

The parents make the rules and educate their dependants. There possibly is a teenager disobeying the rules and also a toddler just testing his wings, both at their own stage of understanding and adapting to their surroundings.

I would like to think, that most parents would be patient, persistent and communicating with their children when they don't obey. If a toddler throws a spoon with food on the floor, the parent won't remove the spoon to avoid the mess and call it a final solution. The parent will teach the toddler how and why to eat properly and by time the result will show.

When the teenager is rebellious and does bad things, just to make a point and look tough in front of friends, I doubt that a parent would give up and say “I skip saying anything because he never changes!”. Human behaviour is complex.

So why aren't some decision-makers persistent and, even more importantly, understanding of the complexity when it comes to littering?

It’s an easy solution to say that all people who litter are stupid. The reality is that it might be correct for some, but far from all. The biggest mistake we can do is to judge the person who is littering and why. Judging makes the decision-makers blinded and not able to prevent it. To think that only education and law enforcement would solve it won’t take you far. Oh, how I wish the issue of littering was an easy one!

It has been shown that it all comes down to four things needed to change the mentality of littering long-term and for people to keep areas clean; maintenance by government, sense of responsibility by residents, penalties as well as rewards and people's habits. All of them have to be looked at, combined, and in a positive and communicative way. If done in a negative way, they might have an opposite effect.

If you go to a friend's house and you see it perfectly clean, most people would more likely help cleaning up after the party. Less would offer assistance if the place looked neglected to start with. The human mind is always analysing the surroundings and setting the norm of what is expected and seen as normal.

When it gets down to the responsibility for an area, people are overall very fast to say that cleaning is the job of others, not theirs. It becomes a bit like the chicken and the egg. It's hard to say what comes first, the litter or the neglect. But we have to start somewhere. It has shown that people tend to imitate the behaviours of others. This is why an already littered and neglected area is more likely to attract more litter, while a clean area is more likely to remain clean. So if everyone did their part and kept areas clean, the chance is higher that they remain clean by time.

One of the issues in Malta, is the disabling of service when it comes to bins and bring in sites. Some decision-makers seem to think that it's enough to put bins and skips. Then when the area later on becomes littered, they quickly claim that people can't dispose of the waste properly and the solution is to remove the bins and skips. This kind of solution is nothing but a fake solution. In reality the only ones punished are the citizens that actually used it properly to start with.

I challenge all decision makers in Malta not to disable bin services and taking an easy way out, but instead enable it. Furthermore I challenge you all to start thinking ‘why’ it isn't working and come up with an action plan to make it work, without judging and pointing fingers. Littering won't disappear by removing the bins. Is the bin overflowing? In many cases it's because of lack of maintenance and maybe the opening shouldn't be big enough for full size garbage bags.

Once we get everyone to use bins and take responsibility of their environment, first then we can slowly start disabling the service. The people, by then already being aware of their surroundings, would bring their waste home. For the sake of the sea we can't afford skipping the sequence, we have to do things in order. We can’t run, before we know how to walk.

Let's enable the service and stop blaming 'others’. It's time to think ‘Why’ and ‘How’. Giving up is not an option, persistence and understanding of the issue is the key for a good prevention plan.