Dunedin's city streets do not keep themselves clean. Dunedin City Council contractors take to the streets to clean up the previous day's rubbish in the early hours.
Most people are sleeping at the time so their work largely goes un-noticed. An awareness day about what it takes to keep Dunedin streets clean and what the public can do to help was held in the Octagon yesterday. The DCC, in partnership with Keep Dunedin Beautiful and Fulton Hogan, the city's rubbish collection contractors, ran the event from 10am.
Roading maintenance engineer Peter Standring said more than 1000km of roads were swept clean throughout Dunedin.
''We want to raise awareness in the city of how much effort goes into keeping our streets clean, how much litter there actually is and what the public can do to help keep our city clean,'' he said.
''Often people are sleeping when the streets are being cleaned so they don't see what is going on behind the scenes and the amount of rubbish collected because people are littering.
''Although we won the Keep New Zealand Beautiful beautiful towns and cities award there is still a long way to go in keeping our streets clean. And there is more we can all be doing to help out.''
At the event there was information about the build-up of rubbish during a single day and how even a small amount of litter, such as chewing gum or cigarette butts, contributed to a bigger mess around the city.
The DCC solid waste, roading and parks teams gave demonstrations on the day and members of the public were invited to make suggestions on how to keep the centre of the city clean.
Keep Dunedin Beautiful co-ordinator Darlene Thomson said statistics showed about 10,000 cigarette butts were picked up off Dunedin streets every week.
To combat the problem Keep Dunedin Beautiful offered Dunedin businesses free cigarette butt bins, as part of a city-wide street cleaning initiative.
The bins could each hold 600 butts, and about 70 were given out on Wednesday.
The council was also encouraging passers-by to exchange their plastic bags for re-usable cloth bags.
