A man has hit out at Royal Mail after spending six years collecting 10,000 elastic bands that had been deliberately dropped by posties on his street.
Paul Brown, from Wallasey, Merseyside, is now demanding that the company pay a £80 littering fine for every band hes picked up off the floor – creating a total of £800,000.
The 48-year-old stated that he always finds the rubber bands on the corner of his street, and once even discovered one in his cats litter box, after the animal had eaten it.
This is what p***es me off when it comes to Royal Mail, he ranted on social media.
I know the streets are already full of litter but more and more of us are trying to do something about it.
But not Royal Mail. Rubber bands – the strangest place I found one was in the cat litter, in the cats shit. Hed eaten it and fortunately it came out again. I threw that one away.
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My local council gives out £80 on the spot fines to people for dropping litter so I estimate that there must be 10,000 rubber bands here at £80 each.
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That comes to £800,000 and thats just what Ive picked up.
Hedgehogs get caught up in them and cant free themselves and it often kills them. Its disgusting and they should make it policy that this stops right now.
It boils my piss. STOP DROPPING RUBBER BANDS ROYAL MAIL.
Mr Brown used to only pick up the rubber bands on weekends, but soon found himself doing it daily after being unable to stop thinking about them.
He has turned all the bands he has collected into a ball that is he states is now the same size as his head.
Describing postal workers as lazy and thoughtless he added that he didnt ever think he would stop picking the elastics up from the street.
They do it intentionally. Why not re use them and save a few quid? Do their bit, he continued.
It would be so easy… and besides that, its illegal. How dare they be so lazy and thoughtless.
Piles of them at the ends of every street is their favourite place to do it. Ive seen them do it.
Mrs Browns post was soon met by a rush of disagreement from postal workers who insisted that the rubber bands are biodegradable and not dropped on purpose.
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Im a Postie and believe me, we dont do it intentionally, Karen McLean said.
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Sometimes you dont know you have dropped elastic bands as they do snap.
I always pick mine up but you dont always notice it and we have to re-use them so they are liable to snap easily and are very painful when you are at the sharp end of it.
While postman Hamish Butler added: Its not Royal Mail at fault, we are told all the time to make sure we dont drop elastic bands on the streets.
Unfortunately a lot of posties just dont [bother] and here lies the problem.
A spokesperson for Royal Mail claimed that the firm had introduced biodegradable bands and encouraged people to reuse them wherever possible.
Royal Mail recognises that rubber bands that litter the ground present a threat to wildlife as well as representing a needless expense, they said.
Every year, we use around 338 tonnes of elastic bands to keep bundles of mail together.
In 2016-17, we reduced the number of rubber bands we purchased by eight per cent.
We achieved this reduction by encouraging our people to reuse elastic bands as much as possible.
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We continue to conduct campaigns to raise awareness of this issue and encourage re-use of rubber bands. We are also reducing the number of rubber bands we buy, by collecting them from incoming mail at Mail Centres and distributing them to nearby Delivery Offices to be re-used.
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Our elastic bands are biodegradable, helping us to minimise our impact on the environment.
The natural rubber content in them means that they will start to biodegrade in an outdoor environment within a year.
Last year we ran a high-profile campaign to raise awareness amongst employees of the negative impact of littering, including the cost to our business.
We ask our postmen and women to return all rubber bands to the delivery office for re-use.
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