WELL done to the youngsters – and town councillors – who put on their plastic gloves, took up their grabbers, and cleaned up the open spaces around Cavendish Park and Orwell Green.

Deputy mayor Doreen Savage told me that disappointingly most of the rubbish picked up was around the skatepark and play area, where there are ample bins.

The children from Orwell High, Grange Primary and Langer Primary showed a fine example to their peers by collecting the litter other youngsters had chucked down and hopefully will be able to influence their colleagues back at school and persuade them to change their ways.

Litter is such a puzzling problem.

I once read a statistic that said something like, if everyone dropped three pieces of rubbish a day, after a month our town centres would be knee-deep in litter. It sounds a bit

far fetched, but you get the general idea.

Our councils spend hundreds of thousands of pounds of our money every year – the money we pay in council tax and would like to see used for improved services or new facilities – simply picking up litter dropped, or thrown out of car windows on the A14, our town streets, paths, parks and play areas, and beaches.

Felixstowe is pretty clean – thanks to the hard work of Suffolk Coastal Services who make a daily sweep of the seafront and town centre – but there is still rubbish around.

Why do people drop litter? Would they simply throw their sweet wrappers or fast-food boxes or empty plastic drinks bottles or cigarette butts on their lounge floor and leave them there? Or in their garden? Perhaps they would.

The tricky bit is how to stop such behaviour.

Signs and fines, education and campaigns, more bins and snazzy recycling ones – not a lot seems to work, and in these times of cutbacks tackling the problem is probably not going to be a high priority.

Any ideas? Tell me how you think we should stop people dropping litter – e-mail me at richard.cornwell@eveningstar.co.uk