Litter? Horrible stuff. Nag the kids enough and they'll eventually use the bin. Very wrong, I'm afraid. Encams, the charity that runs the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, has been taking a long, hard look at why its anti-litter messages have failed miserably to engage young people.
The result is a sometimes lurid tale involving postmodernism, freelance semioticians and a deeply ingrained teenage horror of dirt.
So what did it find out? It discovered it didn't understand the teenage mindset. It has run campaigns with adults that have reduced car littering and dog fouling by up to 40 per cent. But, as Encams readily acknowledges, the results with young people have been terrible. Despite a range of "stick-and-carrot" approaches of fines, rewards and education and publicity campaigns, the best it could do was an eight per cent reduction.
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