PENSIONER Hazel Hogg has declared war on litter at the age of 83.
She has launched a one-woman crusade after heading out on the roads near her home to clean up after litterbugs.
Mrs Hogg, of Sutton Poyntz, claims Sutton Road could be the muckiest road in town after she was overwhelmed by the amount of rubbish she encountered on her clean up operation.
Now she has hit out at motorists for using vergesides, pavements and roads as dustbins for rubbish and cigarette butts.
Mrs Hogg said she regularly walks along her road and picks up what litter she can.
But – with verges getting increasingly worse – she decided to take more drastic action.
She said: “I normally take it upon myself to pick up litter if I see any but I went out properly prepared the other day with a big black bin bag to pick up as many bits as I could.
“I had to give up before I even got to the end of the road because the bag was so heavy.
“It was all over the hedges everywhere, you could get mountains of litter.
“It’s not easy to reach most all of it, you have to scramble up the bank. I have no idea how it all got there. There are all sorts of things, plastic bottles and god knows what.”
Mrs Hogg said she thought motorists were the main culprits, claiming they treat the countryside surrounding the route as a rubbish bin.
She said: “People seem to gather up their litter in the car in a bag and just throw that out the window. Why they can’t just take it to the nearest bin I don’t know.”
Mrs Hogg said several areas of Weymouth were suffering from people’s lack of regard for the cleanliness of public highways and byways.
She added: “You don’t throw rubbish about your own garden so why should you assume the countryside and hedges are a place where you can leave your litter?”
Mrs Hogg also said that, while it did not provide an excuse for people to dump their litter at the side of the road, the excessive amount of packaging on many products had also contributed to an increase in the amount of rubbish left lying around.
She said: “I am beginning to think that the manufacturers who make all the packaging should bear some responsibility.”
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