Glasgow Scouts hit out at lager lout dumping Budweiser crates at hall

Leaders at the 30th Glasgow/1st Cardonald Scouts are up in arms over the lager lout, who leaves scores of glass bottles at a bin beside their base.

Tracy Doyle, an executive committee member of the troop said: “It’s a local resident that dumps them there.

“We put a poster up before saying we are all trying to keep Glasgow clean. Because he’s dumping it, then more people think they can just dump there too.

“One day I arrived and there was a baby chair, a standing lamp, and a bike as well as the Budweiser.”

She thinks it undermines the environmental lessons the group wants to instil in the young people involved with the Scouting movement.

“We’re trying to teach them to value the environment that we live in and when they see adults doing this – not even children but grown adults.

“When they come in the gate, you have to say: ‘Oh, never mind about all those bottles sitting there’.

“And we also just hope people don’t think it’s us dumping there.”

Tracy has attempted to “shame” the culprit into changing his ways with posts in the local community Facebook page, which she said worked for a time, only for the problem to spring back up again.

“He even puts the lids back on them,” added Tracy. “There are also just bags of rubbish that get left. When we’re in the gardens, a lot of the residents tell us that we are doing very good work.

“People with eyesight problems could trip and fall over it. I’ve also seen local schoolchildren picking up the bottles and just carrying on but somebody is going to get hurt.”

The troop have had help from their local councillor, Jim Kavanagh, to combat the illegal fly-tipping.

Tracy said the problem had been going on for “months and months”.

“Because we’ve been back in the hall more recently, we have noticed it more.

“The binmen told us they weren’t allowed to pick it up because it was outside the bin but on that occasion they did because we were having the Beavers in that day.”

We revealed in March that Glasgow City Council was alerted to more than 20,000 reports of fly-tipping in 2020. The offence carries an on-the-spot fine of £200, rising to £40,000 if they take the case to court.

Only 33 fines were handed out last year, with the people of Cardonald reporting 430 instances of reckless dumping.

A spokesman for the council said: “Fly-tipping is a blatant form of anti-social behaviour that damages the environment, undermines communities and diverts scarce resources to clearing up after people who deliberately choose to dump their waste in unacceptable ways.

“Despite the impact of Covid, staff have worked hard to deal with the anti-social behaviour committed by a minority of city residents. Our figures show that while there has been a very slight increase in fly-tipping over the course of 2020, there has been a 23.5 per cent increase in the number of fly-tipping incidents cleared by our teams.

“The dispiriting part of this issue is that there is no excuse for fly-tipping as our four, major household waste recycling centres are open seven days a week. Housing associations have also played a significant part in removing large items on behalf of their residents over the course of the pandemic and the request-only bulk uplift service has been heavily used since it resumed late last year.

“Wherever we find evidence of who is responsible for individual acts of fly-tipping we will take enforcement action and we do work liaise with the police in support of prosecutions against those who commit this kind of environmental crime.”

The scouting movement was ignited by the publication of Lord Robert Baden-Powell’s book Scouting for Boys in 1907. The 30th Glasgow group celebrated its 110th anniversary in 2019.