Grime-busters in big clean-up

They find items of lost property and even money that people have dropped. In the course of a year they can remove more than 400 fridge freezers and 800 tonnes of litter.

And now the dedicated team of workers at Wolverhampton City Council are scouring each and every street for signs of rubbish as part of a grime-busting plan to rid the area of waste.

Operation Spring Clean, which has been launched in partnership with the Express & Star, will see workers cover a total of 3,390 streets, covering 472 miles, over a four-week period.

Every public street and highway in the city is being checked with parkland, hedges, gutters, alleyways and walls all being scrubbed up.

It's not just a case of the team sprucing up the streets though, the workers who carry out the job come across all sorts of horrifying items, including needles, rats and dead animals.

We joined them for a cleaning session out on the city's streets.

Things started on Coseley Road.

The team work together, with two men brushing and scraping the gutters and pavements for men with litter picks to collect the plastic and metal that is dropped.

McDonalds wrappers and plastic bottles are a large feature of this sort of job.

Behind the litter pickers are small vehicles which sweep up any leftover rubbish and clean the road.

It is down to the drivers to pick up any larger pieces, such as branches and weeds.

They all work together as a team and take a huge amount of pride in their job.

Chris Cooper, who has worked for the council for 12 years, said: "You get some areas that are worse than others, The Lunt and Bradley are always quite bad for litter, but everywhere has its bad spots.

"I'm very proud to do this job. There is a sense of civic pride in cleaning up the streets.

"It's nice to know that you are making a difference. Sometimes we take before and after pictures of areas that were really bad when we got there.

"It is quite frustrating when you drive past a week later and it is messy again though."

Phil Morris, who has cleaned the streets of Wolverhampton for three years, said: "The people of Wolverhampton deserve clean street. I moved here from Cheshire in 1981 and I really like the place, and the people.

"The lads who work here all look out for each other and we are a team. The different areas all work together, and I enjoy doing my job.

"I look along a street and see how dirty it is and then look at it after we have cleaned it, and you get a certain amount of satisfaction from it."

While out and about they encounter an alley way, full of empty crisp wrappers and bottles of alcohol.

They see sights far worse than that though.

Mr Cooper added: "You see all sorts of things in this job, some of them aren't that nice.

"I have been litter picking in a bush and stepped on a live rat.

"You see dead rats and things like needles and empty bottles of alcohol.

"It's not a surprise to see an empty bottle of rum, or vodka.

"We once had to get a dead swan out of Ladymoor pool. We had to get a boat and try to fish it out which was different.

"The strangest thing I ever found was a set of dentures in Bradley. It was quite bizarre. But you see pretty much everything in this job so you get used to it very quickly.

And Mr Morris added: "It can get a bit boring doing it eight hours a day but then you'll do something different tomorrow so it's not too bad.

"There's nothing that springs to mind for me as the worst thing that I have seen.

"You get a lot of road kill that we have to deal with, cats, dogs, badgers every now and then.

"That's not nice but it's all part of the job.

"You'd be surprised at how much money we find.

"It all gets handed in to the management.

"We find a lot of wallets as well and they get handed in and hopefully someone has reported it lost and it gets back to them.

"We assist the police with road traffic accidents every now and then, and sometimes work with Severn Trent Water."

It's a huge job but despite the council having to find £123million worth of savings over the next five years bosses say the current financial crisis will not affect their ability to clean the streets.

They are calling for the residents of the city to take more pride in their area and help keep the streets clean.

Paul Hodgetts, a manager in the public realm services at the council, had laid bare the extent of just how much rubbish they pick up off the street each year.

Mr Hodgetts said the figures show just how much the council have to spend on cleaning up the area.

Mr Hodgetts, commercial performance manager in public realm service, said: "We removed 800 tonnes of litter in the last year, and to put that into perspective, that is the same as 160 million sheets of A4 paper.

" That's enough paper to fill 840 double deckers buses, so you can see the scale of what we are dealing with here.

"Fly tipping is also a problem.

"We took 435 fridge freezers and 838 pieces of furniture."

He also said the council have cleaned car parks 600 times in the last year, parks 200 times and cleaned the city centre 240 times.

Steve Barlow, environmental health manager in public protection, said: "Those figures are just from council owned land. If it is on private land then the responsibility to falls on the owner to get it removed.

"We are getting more and more complaints about fly tipping."

Council chiefs say they are relying on reports from members of the public to alert them to areas which need to be cleaned.

In recent years, the council have achieved a 95 to 97 per cent average of cleanliness, which is more than the national standard.

But Mr Hodgetts said the council want to increase that figure further – with the help of the public.

He said: "We have to put the street cleaners where the problems are. You can't clean a clean street, so we need this information from the public.

"We have been at this standard for about four years now, but before that we were achieving low figures, sometimes double figures lower than we should be.

"But in the last six or seven years we have made a dramatic improvement, and we want to maintain that standard going forward, even with budget pressures."

Litter and associated issues such as dog fouling tend to be the kind of thing that residents are keen to see councils take action on.

Wolverhampton City Council enforcement officer Ashley Foster said: It's something that always comes up when we do surveys with the residents."

"We need them to give us information, such as a description, time, days, and place so we can act on it. Most people who get given a fixed penalty notice for it don't do it again."

The issue of litter is a problem throughout the region.

Across the Black Country and Staffordshire in 2012 more than 2,200 fines were handed out to people dropping litter.

Sandwell Council has adopted a zero-tolerance approach with dog fouling that has seen dozens of pet owners slapped with £75 on-the-spot fines in six months.

The clampdown has seen wardens issue 73 fines in six months, while thousands of dog mess bags have been handed out and people have been educated on how to keep streets and open spaces clean.

Bosses at the local authority have also been considering using temporary stencils on pavements in hotspot areas for complaints, in a bid to warn people about the likely prospect of fines.

The action is being taken by the council and its waste partner Serco.

Bosses are also encouraging residents to report others who do not scoop up dog dirt - including specific details like time, date, location, description of the dog and its owner – so mess can be cleaned up and those responsible can be tracked down.

People who drop litter on pavements across Walsall have been warned they face a hefty fine.

Walsall Council has the power to take prosecution action against anyone who leaves rubbish on the floor.

Four people who dropped their cigarette butts in Walsall and didn't pay the fixed penalty notice were recently ordered to pay £150 each by the town's magistrates.

Councillor Zahid Ali, portfolio holder for public health and protection, said: "We want the borough of Walsall to be a clean and tidy place for everyone to enjoy and this stands as a reminder that if you are irresponsible and drop litter in the borough then you may face a hefty fine.

"It is much easier just to find somewhere to suitable dispose of your rubbish," he added. Litter patrols carried out by the environmental health team at Walsall Council.

In neighbouring Dudley residents are being encouraged to hold their own litter picks amid cuts to the street cleaning department.

Mr Barlow said that the budget pressures the council currently find themselves under have now bearing on how they handle a case.

He said: "We handle each case on its merits. For example, if someone goes to put litter in a bin and it misses we'll just tell them to put it in the bin, we aren't going to prosecute for that.

"But we do have an issue if someone dog fouls or litters, then we will issue a fixed penalty notice.

"We take it into consideration and if it is in the public interest then we will take it to court if we need to.

"Each case is handled separately and we wouldn't not go forward just because of money. It's not about that."