Motorists plagued by rubbish

ROADS

Rubbish is proving a curse for motorists, as Britain's roads are clogged up with more than 2 million pieces of junk at any one time, a study showed yesterday.

Debris includes 312,000 broken car parts and 240,000 dead animals, according to the study, carried out for Autoglass. The company got 500 drivers to keep a "roadwatch" diary for a week, covering a sixth of Britain's road network.

Each driver saw an average of 26 pieces of rubbish. For the country as a whole, this adds up to 768,000 pieces of general rubbish, 576,000 cans and cigarette boxes, 480,000 items of road debris, such as loose tarmac and gravel, 312,000 pieces of car debris, like tyres and exhausts, and 240,000 dead animals.

More than half the drivers (54 per cent) said they were forced to swerve to avoid objects and nearly three quarters (72 per cent) complained there was more rubbish on the roads now than five years ago.