How To Keep Streets Clean

• Why clean streets matter
• What you can do to help keep streets clean
  • Dispose of rubbish properly
  • Sweeping 
  • Uphold all hygiene standards
  • Reuse and recycle 
  • Carpool
• Keeping your streets clean with ICE Cleaning

When you consider the primary function of a street, it is for people to be able to quickly and safely walk, run or cycle from one location to another. You are never cautious about how you walk until you start seeing rubbish build up all over the streets, and you start having to carefully navigate past these items to ensure you don’t fall over. When a street is spotless, free from graffiti, rubbish and waste, it wouldn’t even come into your mind that you have to be cautious of the people around you. When a street is littered with rubbish, low lighting and overturned bins everywhere, ultimately the street looks unsightly, crime rates are increased and your 6th sense kicks in to advise you to not walk down the street alone. 

The presence of built-up rubbish can negatively impact the values of houses within the neighbourhood. A massive 93% of homeowners said that rubbish and dirty streets would deter their decision to buy a home. With the latest government figures revealing that “councils in the county spent £12.7 million on the street cleaning in 2018/19″, to ensure no form of negative impact occurs within their city such as house prices dropping.

There are a variety of things we can be doing as homeowners to ensure the streets that we live on are kept clean, safe and hygienic such as;

• Report any forms of mass rubbish dumping
• Put all rubbish, including food waste into the correct bins
• If you are a smoker, it is your responsibility to dispose of your cigarette in the correct bin
• If for any reason you can’t find a bin, take your rubbish home. Do not throw rubbish on to the streets.
• Dispose of all bulky items by taking it to the nearest waste recycling centre.
• Dispose of chewing gum in the correct manner

Your community needs active residents to ensure the outside of their house is clean. If everyone on the street does their part to clean the small section outside of their home, the entire street will become healthier to live down.

Why Clean Streets Matter

Ultimately clean streets equal a healthier and safer environment for everyone. Ensuring the streets in your local community is clean and hygienic has a much more significant impact than only looking visually pleasing. By keeping rubbish, debris and hazardous materials such as metal and glass off the streets, allows the public to walk freely around the areas, without the fear of accidentally slipping over, or worst of all falling onto the hazardous material and injuring yourself. 

Hazardous materials that are dumped and left on your streets by neighbours or passers-by can not only look unsightly but, can also allow toxins to fester into the air that will ultimately be breathed in by you and your family.

Clean streets have been scientifically proven to reduce the crime rates, and create a safer atmosphere if you are to be walking alone or late at night. 

What You Can Do To Help Keep Your Streets Clean

We can all help out, do our part to ensure our community streets stay clean. With the Pandemic of 2020 highlighting health and hygiene standards, we all need to do our role in maintaining cleaner cities, to not only keep ourselves healthy but to keep the environment thriving. We need to ensure no animals are becoming ill or injured from our rubbish everywhere and maintaining crime and anti-social rates to an all-time low. 

We are the harshest critics of our communities. We never blame ourselves; we are the first people to lash out at corporations and the government, stating that it is their job to keep everything clean and hygienic for us. While it is part of their job to ensure all of our streets are hygienically cleaned and are not putting our health at risk, we also have a social responsibility to keep our local areas clean. Below we have listed a couple of tips to help keep your communities’ streets clean and hygienic. 

Dispose Of Rubbish Properly

Many of us have awful habits when it comes to disposing of rubbish correctly. Even when the local council gives us bins that collect certain materials, we still end up with the majority of waste going to tipping grounds.

Disposing of your rubbish in the correct bins can take up more time, but it is the first step to creating a more hygienic and cleaner environment on your street. Once neighbours begin to see you correctly disposing of rubbish, they will subconsciously do the same thing, which will subsequently result in their neighbours copying them, very soon the entire street are correctly disposing of their rubbish. This will result in a massive decrease in litter being kicked around the streets. 

Sweeping

Public streets see a lot of action throughout the day, thousands of people can walk past your house every day, this can result in an increase in rubbish that isn’t yours building up around your home and within your streets. While we completely understand that you didn’t make the mess, it is on your road, and if you want to live in a clean, rat-free street, the area needs to be swept.

Simply sweeping outside of your house and safely disposing the rubbish into the correct bins can increase visual appearance and encourage a neighbour to do the same thing. Sweeping not only creates a visually pleasing, clean neighbourhood, but the activity will remove all forms of stray rubbish, debris, stains and highly reduces the risk of any hazardous toxins festering within the build-up of waste.

Uphold All Hygiene Standards

One of the essential elements to keep your streets clean is to maintain hygiene standards outside of your house to an impeccable level. Ensuring the lids to all of your bins are correctly shut is crucial to stopping rubbish being scattered all over your street. 

Foxes can be a massive issue; they are known to jump into bins, drag rubbish out, knock bins over and cause a complete mess. While you can’t train a wild animal to not jump into your bins, you can completely stop the opportunity of them being able to jump in. Always make sure your bin lids are entirely shut, if you can wheel them into a garage or leave them as close to your house as possible. This will deter foxes from attempting to get into your bins. 

Reuse And Recycle

Reuse and recycle as much as possible is a route to take when trying to create cleaner streets. If there is an object you don’t need anymore, don’t just throw it away, find another way to use it. Ask neighbours, friends and family if they possibly need or could use the object in any way. While you may not be able to reuse the particular item, it could be the one thing your friends or family are looking for. As a last resort, if you have to throw the object away, ensure that the correct measures are put in place when it comes to disposing of the items or products that you no longer use. 

If the object you are looking to dispose of is of gigantic stature, ensure that you take it down to your local tip, where the object will be destroyed efficiently. For your benefit we have linked the some of the South East recycling centres for you to dispose of large items properly:

• Kent – County Council
• Bexley – Rubbish and Recycling Centre 
• Greenwich – Reuse and Recycling Centre

Carpool

If you live on a street that has children going to the same school, offer to take your child’s friends, this will lead to a reduction in carbon emissions. While this activity will not show you any visual benefits, the air quality you breathe will improve significantly, reducing the amount of toxins you breathe in on a daily basis. 

You can keep your local communities’ streets cleaning by following these simple everyday actions. Within days you will begin to see a change within the streets you live on and the attitude of your fellow neighbours.

Keeping Your Streets Clean With ICE Cleaning

Here at ICE, we offer a street cleaning service that encompasses:

• Graffiti
• Biohazards
• Bird dropping
• Chewing gum 
• General dirt and grime
• Unidentified stains and more 

If you don’t have the time or your streets has built up with rubbish that you can handle, then give us a call. One of our support teams will happily walk you through the process.