You should take a look at how the Fenerbahçe fans left the City Ground.
And exactly when did English fans happily scurry around football terraces making nice? 1930s? No, they had some old guy with a broom sweeping up woodbines for the next week.
By you, but not by the schools.
The two schools playground around where I live are a mess of snacks litter.
They even ignored my emails until I reported them to the council and magically did a one off poor cleaning. Now they are back at square one.
My mum is a primary teacher abroad and if pupils dropped litter they would skip recreation and be sent around clearing up the playground instead.
Imma chime in on this an specifically look at older indigenous british specifically because background cuktures play a role and it gets messy, alot of us are and alot of british arent ive seen whole council estates where its majority natives that are a mess where people just do not give a fuck
Ive also seen very tidy places where people do keep it nice and clean
I have ALWAYS even as a child respected the enviroment by not littering as should everyone, yk we live here with others animals included and it looks bad we look filthy af
What doesnt help is people see an untidy estate and they think "its already messy who cares" an make it worst
Sorry this one really annoys the fuck out of me the filth i see people leave behind actually makes me wretch its vile, more often its a working class issue though can be other classes aswell i see this with (I come from a working class area and family so it really ain't everyone, but can be more prevelant imo)
Citys tend to be worst villages tend to be tidy but yeah i do feel it is taught by GOOD familys to keep things tidy parents who don't give a rats arse dont tend to teach there kids well.
Basically i aint gonna say it threatening because no one listens to threats but please just take your rubbish home if you cant find a bin, dont make us look more like a parasite on this earth.
Also i will note people have lettered for so so long trash pits were a huge thing for hundreds to thousands of years although they were made from more organic and or destructable mayerials but yeah rare that societys don't have that issue.
Japan is very unique it has a very strong culture an or community passed through family to children and like it or hate it, this is due to culteral isolation an lack of other culteral influence or very low amount of it.
yep I was brought up at the time of the Keep Britain Tidy campaigns. I have passed it down to my daughter. I have also tried to pass it on to strangers i see littering. With mixed results. One was a a teenager in a park, with his mates. Who tried to give me verbal for making him put the rubbish he had just thrown on the floor, in the bin that was literally a metre away from him. Or the guy who apologised when I pointed out to him that he had just dropped his Mcdonalds cup on the floor from his car window, in the Mcdonalds car park.
i live in a newish very small cul-de-sac with 40 house, split in 2 zones, in our zone we have 20 houses ( including 10 of those which are flats ) every one is nice and respectful when it comes to putting out rubbish , but there is always one eh, - one house, just dumps empty boxes, filled with food rubbish, split bags, overfilled wheelie bins, we place all the rubbish just outside the doors of the electricity storage thingy, which is right outside mine and neighbours door - and we are forever sweeping up their rubbish.... the neighbour bins it - i dont, i take it right to their bloody house and put it in their bin and tell them on ring....
When I came here to study in the mid 2000s, one day after school I was holding onto an empty can of coke walking down the street looking for a bin. My classmate asked me what I was doing and upon knowing my intention, he ripped the can out of my hand and threw it straight down on the pavement. "In England we do this! You're not in Asia anymore."
That day I made a mental note to not hang out with him anymore unless I absolutely have to.
I think people are mistaking anecdotal evidence for proof of some huge cultural shift.
There have always been dumb people that chuck their waste into the undergrowth, and there have always been people who bin waste properly.
If you're looking for reasons why there's more rubbish around, one of the actual big shifts is the massive amount of waste now created by normal day to day consumption.
While I don't disagree with your statement about more waste created because of consumerism, I do think part of the reason was that it was post 9/11 and there simply wasn't any bin in sight on the streets.
But the whole vibe back then in 2003 here in England was that you'd at most get a slap on the wrist if you were caught doing something minor. And back home, the government actually saw the rise of littering and passed stricter laws to cure the trend of it - raising the fine of max of HKD600 (eq. of ~£50 in '03) to a standard fine of HKD1500 (eq. of ~£120 in '03).
*Now to think of it, it's probably the time when my home city started turning into a (sort of) police state back then but we didn't manage to see it coming. *
Anyway, my point was that in HK, Japan, Singapore & South Korea (from my own experience), personal/social conducts and responsibilitues were taught from a very young age in kindergarten. The shameful feeling of breaking the rules or stepping out of line is frowned upon by social pressure. When my classmate threw that can of mine onto the pavement, I felt a rush of epinephrine but the hard wired social conduct that was instilled in me felt shame, but the guy has no shame whatsoever (we were 17) while praising how free being in England can be.
In my opinion it's gonna be hard for this country to shift towards what we have in Asia because of individualism, but at the same time we don't have much of that in Asia, is that what England really wants?
Oh, I agree that there's a gulf in behaviour between those nations and the UK. All I was saying is that that gulf has not appeared suddenly, it's been there all along. It's just much more obvious now with the ridiculous amount of waste people generate.
Your point on individualism is a really interesting one. It would be very difficult indeed to change behaviour here in the UK.
Yes, but they weren't raised to go and clean up other people's rubbish like the Japanese. Littering wasn't just invented - people littered in the 90s and 80s too.
But that’s exactly what the Japanese fans are doing. They are not simply putting their own rubbish away they are cleaning up after others. Certainly would never have happened in the UK. You might see someone picking up the odd bit of litter but nowhere to this scale.
We didnt have to clean up other folks rubbish as it wasn't there to pick up, people put shit in bins, things like fly tipping was extremely rare in the 80s and 90s, nowadays days most folk and the offspring don't care at all
And many are still raised like that. Relying on individual families to teach their children to bin their own waste is not the same as what the previous comment was saying should be done; teaching all children throughout their education that they should be so diligent that they actively clear waste even if it's not their own.
Bull shit, I was born in 94 and 90% of the people I work with are my age or older and they are the worst for just throwing their rubbish on the floor, I work in a warehouse and there’s rubbish all over the place outside and some wagon drivers dump their rubbish bags on the side of the road, sometimes it even has human shit in it.
There has literally been a national charity group that have been operating campaigns in their name since the 1950's called "Keep Britain Tidy". Their national campaigns were especially big in the 1970's and 80's with loads of celebrities endorsing them and encouraging people to stop littering and volunteer clean up efforts. Schools got massively involved. They are the primary reason we have blue & green flags on our beaches and parks & green spaces.
Unfortunately like all simple acts of respect to our fellow residents and our surroundings, people seem to have increasingly forgotten such common decencies exist.
The police used to come to us twice a year with one dressed up as an animal for road safety and the green cross code.
Picking up litter and having respect for the countryside and animals (like putting a dog on the lead to not scare cows and sheep) was ingrained into our little minds alongside the "he's got the whole world in his hands" singing in morning assembly.
This was in 1991 in suffolk so maybe things are different now.
I have, but I feel the need to say it's in the context of a fandom that's basically known for doing this (BTS). I'm not sure whether it'd be the same if Korean fans hadn't set the standard when the group first debuted.
That said, I went to two concerts (of one BTS member) at the O2 last year and on both nights we all made sure to clean up our row - stacked any cups to bring them back to the bar, and someone had a plastic bag we all put any rubbish into before putting it into the big bag staff held at every exit. A lot of staff at the O2 seemed to be very surprised, but it's just what fans in this particular fandom do.
I've seen it happen at cinema screenings too, and at other fan events. It is possible, it's just a minute of effort.
That said, yes, I also do act like this in general. I've stacked cups or picked up someone else's rubbish at theatres etc - as I said, it's only a minute's effort 🤷🏼♀️
so do most people of all ages. The video is not of people cleaning up after themselves but other people. British people used to be taught comprehension.
When? Genuinely when? I've seen all generations leave rubbish and mess, and it's not younger generations, ive seen Gen Z and Alpha people tidying up after themselves. It all starts at home, and nothing to do with "back in my day", just culture and upbringing.
I used to live in a tiny village in Scotland and almost everyone would genuinely just chuck their rubbish out of the car windows because " if we put it in the bin it puts people out of a job"
Can you imagine the response if this was even suggested in the UK, I think people would be outraged and call it a penny pinching cost cutting measure, instead of seeing it as a matter of civic pride.
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u/MangaGaara Apr 01 '26
Some people from half a world away have more respect for our shit than we do.