First anti-litter study to look into littering habits of Singaporeans
SINGAPORE: Littering is on the rise and to tackle this, an anti-litter study aims to examine why Singaporeans litter.

The study involves observing people's behaviour in popular places like coffeeshops and conducting face-to-face interviews.

Last year, slightly more than 3,800 people were caught littering.

Unfortunately, the figure has risen to over 4,800 in the first 10 months of this year.
So in the latest effort by the National Environment Agency to clean up Singapore, it is monitoring parks, bus interchanges and coffeeshops.

Dr Amy Khor, Senior Parliamentary Secretary of Environment and Water Resources, says: "Some young people may be littering by sheer habit as they expect someone to be cleaning and picking up after them. So I think we have to reinforce the message and try to correct this perception. If somebody is littering, you have to remind them that it is a poor social behaviour."

The study started two months ago and will end in February next year.

Preliminary results have found that just over a quarter of people did not think throwing small items like cigarette butts and tissue constitutes littering.

Just more than a third thinks it is the responsibility of the coffeeshop to keep their premises clean, not theirs.

So to help change that perception, researchers are looking at the determining factors linked to littering.

Dr Pang Fung Yin, Head, 3P Partnerships, National Environment Agency (NEA), says: "Currently we don't really understand the motivating factors, the influence factors. This is why we want to do this study, to help us better understand the population and what are the factors that are influencing them when it comes to binning of their litter."

To support this campaign, coffeeshop chains have put new measures in place.

David Leong, Operations Manager at Koufu, says: "We do have a system to audit our store owners, and at the same time, audit our contract cleaners. Previously we do not have such a system. It's basically about your standard and my standard. We sit down with the contractors and we talk about it."

The NEA hopes to use the information from about 200 places and around 3,000 people to devise future anti-littering campaigns.