The Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Urban Street Litter in South Africa
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The Impact of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Urban Street Litter in South Africa Peter G. Ryan 1
& Kyle Maclean
1
& Eleanor A. Weideman
1
Received: 17 July 2020 / Accepted: 2 October 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The lockdowns instigated to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic offered
a unique opportunity to assess how restrictions on human activity affect street litter. We recorded daily litter arrival rates for 50 days in two South African cities from the time of strictest lockdown through two successive easings in regulations. The strict lockdown had no marked impact on litter composition, which was dominated by convenience foods and beverages (29% by number, 34% by mass) and tobacco products (33% by number, 3% by mass). The ban on the sale of tobacco products during the lockdown did not greatly reduce the number of cigarette butts and associated packaging. Vehicle parts accounted for 1 cm, but we did not collect organic waste (e.g., fruit peel). We then cleaned, dried and weighed all litter items. We weighed most items to the nearest 0.1 g on a top pan balance (0.01 g for small items), but items >120 g were weighed with a spring balance to the nearest 5 g (120–500 g) or 50 g (> 500 g). Litter was categorised according to its material (plastic, glass, wood, paper, metal, etc.) and source: street litter which had evidently been dropped by pedestrians or people in vehicles, and vehiclerelated litter (i.e., loose vehicle parts). In Cape Town, litter found close to bins that had evidently been dropped by rubbish collectors or people rummaging through bins was categorised as bin litter. This category was not relevant to Durban as there were no bins situated within the study area. For both sites, we further categorised street litter according to its use: food packaging such as chip packets or sweet wrappers, hygiene-related items such as face masks, gloves, wet wipes, tissues and toilet paper, and tobacco-related litter such as cigarette butts, matches and lighters. We used Wilcoxon rank sum tests to compare the number of items and mass of litter found at the two sites. To assess if there was a change in the proportion of plastic litter during the three stages of lockdown, we used chi-square tests. We used Generalised Linear Models (GLMs) to assess how the number and mass of litter items collected per day changed as lockdown levels eased from level 5 to level 3. We modelled the number and mass of items per day as a function of both lockdown level and study day (day 1–50) in the R statistical
Ryan P. et al.
environment (R Core Team 2020), with daily rainfall as a covariate because rain might reduce litter loads by decreasing the number of pedestrians and washing away some litter items. Models were fit for each site separately using a quasi-Poisson distribution to account for the data being overdispersed. Data are reported as means ± SD or as median and inter-quartile ranges where data were strongly right-skewed.
3 Results In Cape Town, 3741 litter items (18.7 ± 9.6 items∙100 m−1∙day−1) w
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