DESPITE recent victories against prominent flytippers we’re still seeing way too many instances of flytipping in Fareham and the wider area as a whole.

Recently one flytipper got a huge £30,000 fine and another was actually imprisoned, but still the problem persists.

Clearly the threat of massive fines and prison sentences aren’t working. We need to explore alternative ways of combating this problem outside of traditional methods. We need to make areas too ‘hot’ to dump at and we need to get residents more proactive at spotting disreputable traders.

One interesting method could be to display posters of successful flytipping prosecutions at common flytipping hotspots. The idea works very similar to cigarette packaging – it hits home much harder if you can see that someone was affected by the flytipping and what might happen to you.

If you’re a potential flytipper and you see a poster of Ashley Mooney (a man who dumped waste across Hampshire) with the headline ‘12 months in prison’ you’re probably more likely to have a rethink.

Another could be to pass some additional responsibility to residents. Guidelines are already in place that residents should request to see a traders’ waste disposal license before using them, but perhaps this doesn’t go far enough. If this were made a legal requirement then residents would take it more seriously.

Additionally if it were found that their rubbish was flytipped and the person they hired to dispose of it had no license, then perhaps the resident in question should also suffer some of the costs of cleaning up the waste if they didn’t check for a license.

There are no easy answers to this problem, but we need to get creative and try and find new solutions.

Tom Davies

Fareham