Report by Joshua Smith and Chloe Farand
LITTER and rubbish from Friday night, when Wales played England in the Six Nations at the Millennium Stadium, was knee deep in the city centre, according to the team who cleaned it up.
Paul Johnston, weekend supervisor for the city centre cleaning team said: “The rubbish was just over my knee deep in Caroline Street and like I said that’s every bin full. We even put out special bags for the event and that’s all been used.
“It took us up until about 11 o’clock this morning because there was more than usual. Usually we finish between 8 and 9 o’clock. (There was) about 7 tonnes of rubbish, maybe even a little bit more.
According to Mr Johnston, England fans are also some of the worst for making a mess when they visit the Welsh capital.
“It all depends when Wales are playing. Last night was a high priority game because England and Wales, you can’t get any bigger than that unless a non-northern hemisphere side comes over like New Zealand or Australia.
“The next big game now will be Ireland v Wales and that will be on the 14th March and that’ll be another party as well. Because we’ve been working here so many years now we’re getting to see that certain internationals bring the biggest lot of rubbish. It’s generally the England-Wales games, the Ireland games, France are okay.
“What we do then is we get extra resources in, we’ll have extra things on top, extra litter pickers and things like that.”
He also urged people to help make the streets of Cardiff cleaner by using the facilities available, not just Cardiff looks nicer, but for the public’s own safety as well.
“We’re well organised in the city centre to try and deal with all these things. We’d tell people to try and use the bins because with the chips see when it goes down and people are walking it becomes like an ice skating rink.
“ If you go out in Caroline Street before we’ve cleaned it, it’s like I said I’ve seen people fall over but once we’ve got down there and started cleaning, we’ve got a washer in there that goes out after the boys finish and then we’ll take up all the oil from the chips.”
