Freesheets: what a load of rubbish
I was staggered to read today that nine-and-a-half tonnes of free sheet newspapers are discarded by London Underground passengers traveling on the Northern, Piccadilly and Jubilee lines EVERY day.
Understandably this is having a massive effect on the contractors deployed to clean up at the end of each day. It seems that due to the mass amount of unwanted paper, Tube Lines have failed to meet their cleanliness targets set by the Transport for London. Because they missed their target the maintenance budget has been cut, which will presumably increase the amount of mess, and so the circle grows.
So many more factors spring to mind as I read through this story; the cost of cleaning resources, the disposal of this paper mountain, the environmental issues, all of which, no doubt, are being be paid for by the commuters, the tax payers and our environment.
Understandably we can not position waste bins in such public places these days with the threat of terrorism and the like, but I feel the London Transport needs to take heed. Is it really beneficial to the commuter to encourage these free sheets to be distributed on the underground? And if so, they need to act responsibly about the waste.
Surprisingly, a spokesperson for Tube Lines has announced that there is little they can do other than ask commuters to take the papers home with them. Am I naive in my thoughts? Somebody needs to take ownership of this problem!
Someone is missing a great PR opportunity here …. namely either of the papers competing in the readership war… by providing branded recycling bins or contributing to the costs of clean up. By supporting the both the commuter and the environment with recycling, publishers might actually gain the upper hand in free sheet war!
Filed under: public relations
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Thought I would just respond to your note about the increase in the number of newspapers left on trains and in stations and hopefully reassure you that we are making efforts to ensure that cleanliness standards do not drop as a result of this. I should point out that I do work for Tube Lines, the company responsible for maintaining and upgrading the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, and yes it is absolutely correct that the threefold increase in newspapers left on our trains and stations does present us with some challenges in terms of meeting our ambience performance target. Yes, we get fined for missing our performance target but that doesn’t mean that we put in less effort keeping the Tube clean. In fact, it spurs us to come up with new and better ways of working to keep the network clean. For example, over the past three months we have increased the number of staff responsible for removing waste from the Tube, focusing on the morning and evening peaks when the papers are distributed and discarded in order to increase our ambience score and ensure passengers get onto clean trains. Over this period our ambience target has shown a marked improvement. Also on the positive side, we do recycle all paper waste left on our three lines and over the past year we have saved nearly £70,000 of which £42,000 has so far been donated to charities supported by employees of Tube Lines.