Why do people litter, and what would change it?

Every morning, before most of us are awake, Bulawayo City Council workers sweep the city centre. They do it in the cold, and they do it in the rain. The Mayor, David Coltart, recently shared a video of a worker sweeping through a downpour, with the caption "No weather will stop the Bulawayo City Council to keep our city clean."

By the afternoon, the same streets are littered again.

That is the observation this study starts from. If the city is cleaned every single day, why does it not stay clean? And what would it take to change that?

Where this fits

This study is part of our work on what makes a high-trust city, which we set out in an earlier post. Of the elements described there, care for shared things is the most visible and the easiest to count, so it is where we begin.

We are not starting with opinions. We are reading what researchers have measured, in Zimbabwe and around the world, and then we plan to test the most promising ideas on real streets and count the results.

A few terms, in plain words

Social norm. An unwritten rule about what people around here do. Nobody votes on it. We learn it by watching each other. "Here, we queue." "Here, we greet elders." "Here, you throw the wrapper on the ground." Norms can be good or bad, and they can change. Not long ago people smoked inside kombis and offices. Today almost nobody does, and it was mostly the looks from other people that changed it, not the police.

Shared space, or commons. Anything that belongs to all of us and to none of us in particular: a pavement, a park, a rank, a river. Shared things are easy to neglect, because each person can think "someone else will look after it." If you have ever shared a kitchen at work or at college, you have seen this: everyone uses the sink, and the dishes pile up.

Evidence. Something that was measured, not just believed. The strongest kind is an experiment: you change one thing in one place, leave a similar place unchanged, and compare. For example, you put new bins on one street and not on the next street, then count the litter on both for a month.

Why start with litter?

Litter is a good first step for simple reasons. You can see it. You can count it every day. It happens thousands of times a day, so change shows up quickly. And it is a small test of the bigger question: do we look after things that belong to all of us?

We want to be honest about the limits. Cleaning a street has not been proven to make a whole city more trusting. Researchers who study trust find that it mostly follows fair and reliable institutions. So litter is where we start, not where we stop.

Why do people litter? What the research shows

Here is what studies have found so far. We will keep adding to this list.

1. Litter invites more litter. In a well-known experiment, 11% of people littered in a clean place, but 41% littered when the place was already dirty. A dirty street quietly tells people "everyone does it here." It is the same reason you hesitate to drop a wrapper on a spotless floor in a bank, but hardly think about it at a rank that is already covered in them.
2. The bin is too far, too full, or missing. A large American study found that about 17% of all disposals ended up as litter, and the rate climbed the further people were from a bin. In Nkulumane, about a third of the households surveyed said they litter "anywhere convenient" when outdoors, and the reason they gave was that bins are few, broken and badly placed (Sinthumule and Mkumbuzi, 2019).
3. Rubbish is not collected often enough. Sweeping is done by people and still happens daily. Collection is done by trucks, and council reports show only 8 or 9 refuse trucks available each day when more than 20 are needed. A full bin that nobody empties becomes a dump. Picture finishing a pie at the rank with the nearest working bin three blocks away. Most of us will not carry that wrapper for three blocks.
4. "It is the council's job." Studies in several Zimbabwean towns find that many residents see waste as the council's responsibility alone. A South African study heard a similar belief: that littering gives cleaners work. You have probably heard it too. Some people believe it is fine for them to litter, because it means someone employed to clean the place keeps a job and feeds their family. By that logic you should also break a few windows on your way home to keep the glaziers busy, and leave your tap running so the plumber can afford school fees. Nobody says that, because it is obviously silly. The sweeper's job is to keep the city clean, not to pick up after people who could have walked three steps to a bin. If you really want to look after the sweeper, greet her, thank her, and give her less to do.
5. Knowing better is not enough. Most people already know that littering is wrong and can be fined. In study after study, awareness goes up and behaviour stays the same. It is like knowing you should not use your phone while driving. Knowing is not the hard part.

One finding surprised us. You might think daily sweeping teaches people to litter, because someone always cleans up. A Dutch experiment tested exactly that. When daily cleaning was reduced, dumping went up, not down. Our sweepers are holding the line. The gap is the hours between the morning sweep and nightfall, when nobody is looking after the street.

What other places have tried

• Kigali, Rwanda is famous for its cleanliness. It relies on a compulsory community work day each month, backed by fines, and human rights groups have criticised how street vendors and homeless people were treated. It worked, but at a cost.
• Singapore uses heavy fines and a very large cleaning workforce. A senior official there once said it is "not a clean city" but "a cleaned city."
• Bogotá, Colombia tried humour in place of punishment. The mayor hired mime artists to gently tease people who broke traffic rules, and handed out thumbs-up and thumbs-down cards for citizens to show each other. Traffic deaths and murders fell sharply during his years in office, so it is counted a success. But the city also tightened its gun and alcohol laws and sacked thousands of corrupt traffic police at the same time, and nobody measured the mimes on their own. The honest verdict is that the humour helped set the tone; it was not the whole cure.
• Ghana began a national clean-up day in 2014. It faded within about two years, partly because the heaps people gathered were not collected. Does this ring a bell? Zimbabwe has had a national clean-up day on the first Friday of every month since 2018. In March 2026 it drew about 500 people across the whole of Bulawayo, church leaders say it is treated as a once-off event rather than a habit, and council itself has reported that what community sweepers gather can sit uncollected for long periods. A clean-up day without a truck behind it is a heap with a date on it.
• A town in Uganda ran friendly competitions between neighbourhoods. Every neighbourhood got the same health talk about burning rubbish, but half of them were also paired off against a rival for eight months, with local leaders rallying their residents, results compared in public, and recognition as the only prize. No cash changed hands. Open burning of waste fell by about 24%, and the change lasted after the competition ended.
• Bulawayo itself has done this before. Around 2012 and 2013, community health clubs in Makokoba, Mzilikazi and Njube organised many more clean-ups than planned, driven by friendly rivalry between clubs: 17 against a target of 3, with council refuse trucks booked in advance. It worked, up to a point. Yards observed to be clean rose from under half to three quarters, though the dumping of disposable nappies did not change at all. The one written account comes from someone who helped run the clubs, and nobody has checked whether the clubs or the habits survived once the programme ended.

The problems we expect to face

• Money. We cannot copy Singapore's budget. Whatever we try has to be cheap.
• Collection. No amount of good behaviour helps if a full bin is never emptied. Any plan has to work with the council's trucks, not around them.
• The law. Ordinary citizens cannot fine anyone, detain anyone, or force anyone to clean. Only the council, the Environmental Management Agency, the police and the courts can punish. We will stay well inside that line.
• Shaming. Posting photos of people who litter may feel satisfying, but it can break the law and it humiliates people. We will not do it.
• Messages alone do not work. A large study in Peru tried nine different messages on thousands of households and none of them changed behaviour. Posters and speeches are not a plan. Even this essay is not hoping to be the changemaker for the whole of the city; it is here to explain what we are about to try, and why.

Ideas we are still weighing

Cameras are one of them. Cameras at dumping hotspots could help the council identify trucks and businesses that dump by the load. But cameras cost money we do not have yet, and filming people raises real questions about privacy and data protection law. We will take legal advice before we decide anything. If you are reading this and you are a lawyer, including a law student, please consider joining Bulawayo Commons as a member. We need you.

What happens next

We plan to start small: a few blocks, counted every day, with similar blocks nearby for comparison. We will publish what we find, including the results that disappoint us.

If you live or work in Bulawayo, you already know things the research does not. Tell us what you see on your street in the comments below. If you are a lawyer, a council worker, a vendor or a teacher, we would especially like to hear from you.

Si ye phambili.