Love Where You Live is Fostering Pride in Cardiff Citizens

Cardiff Council’s Love Where You Live campaign is dedicated to keeping the streets and community areas of the city clean and fostering a sense of love and care for the place we live. Whether it’s coming along to a group litter pick, doing a bit of urban gardening, or reporting a fly-tip – it all adds up and makes a big difference to where you live. Love Where you Live is based on the following five main principles.

Regular Campaigns

The team runs regular campaigns, such as: the Autumn/Winter Big Sweeps where members of the community get together to sweep up fallen leaves, Leave only Pawprints which is a non-confrontational friendly way to change attitudes and behaviours around dog fouling and the Love Your Parks campaign which organises summer litter picks in local parks. There’s loads of ways to get involved, whether individuals or families with children! The current campaigns can be found on the Keep Cardiff Tidy website.

Litter Champions

Are you interested in helping your local community and helping to clean up Cardiff’s streets of litter? Then why not become a Litter Champion? If you sign up as a Litter Champion, then you will have access to borrow litter picking equipment and pink bags from your local hub and/or library. Making it simple to get stuck into the rewarding world of litter picking! You can also find details of litter picking groups at https://www.keepcardifftidy.com/community/

Zero Tolerance Litter Policy

Advertising throughout the city will remind litterbugs of the fines they can face if enforcement officers find them littering. Enforcement officers can issue Fixed Penalty Notices from £100 for littering up to an unlimited fine imposed by the court for fly tipping. There are a number of enforcement teams operating in the city and an additional team is now operating in student areas of the city. Enforcement Officers do not only focus on residential or business properties that do not present their waste correctly at the kerbside. They will also enforce against those that illegally store waste in the frontages of properties and companies or individuals that put skips on the highway or on council land without the correct permission.

Raising Recycling Awareness

Doing your bit to recycle and compost is essential for the city. The Welsh Government has set challenging recycling targets, higher than the targets set in England. The City needs to recycle and compost 70% of its waste by 2025. Love Where you Live would like to thank all those that are working with the team by separating their waste for recycling. All local authorities in Wales could be financially penalised if these targets are not met. This could be as high as £400 000 for every percent missed from these targets. It is in the interests of the taxpayer for everyone to play their part and recycle and compost as much of their waste as possible.

Education Programmes

The Love Where You Live team offer school visits to all Primary and Secondary schools in Cardiff. They can take children on a litter pick of the local area, or come into an assembly or classroom and talk about litter and fly-tipping issues.

The team also runs the Love Where You Live badge aimed at members of Scouting and Guiding, completely free for all units within Cardiff.

There are so many ways to get involved with the team, help show your local area some love and keep it clean and beautiful. If you wish to start a litter picking group for council tenants or get your housing group involved that’s certainly possible! For more information or to talk about how you can get involved, call the team on 029 2071 7564 or e-mail at lovewhereyoulive@cardiff.gov.uk