A LITTER picking group in Greater Manchester is at war with Royal Mail over rubber bands dropped by its postal workers.

Stretford Litter Pickers posted a thread on Twitter after one of the group’s members found eight rubber bands on a 200m stretch of School Road, on the south side of Victoria Park.

In the thread, the group suggested it does not take ‘Isaac Newton’ to figure out the implications for the environment if the same level of littering is happening across the country.

“Now, we’re no Isaac Newton, but we can work out that if this is replicated across approximately 196,400 miles of minor C and U roads in Britain, [Royal Mail’s] posties could be littering 12,569,600 rubber bands each time the network is covered,” one tweet said.

“That’s potentially 12,569,600 pieces of litter polluting our communities and being washed into watercourses or ingested by wildlife,” another tweet added.

Royal Mail was tagged in the thread, but it has not responded.

And Hannah Chipperfield, the founder and organiser of Stretford Litter Pickers, thinks the postal service needs to take the problem of littering more seriously.

She said: “Dropping litter is illegal and it’s upsetting that some posties don’t seem to understand or care about the impact litter pollution is having on our communities and the environment.

“They should be respected role models in the community, but at the moment they’re sending a message to others that littering is acceptable. Something within Royal Mail needs to change.”

Hannah is calling for Royal Mail to adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to littering for its workers, with punishments for those who break the rules.

She also wants the postal service to include anti-littering messages in its training programmes.

Asked for a comment by The Messenger, a Royal Mail spokesperson said: “We recognise that the littering of elastic bands is a potential threat to wildlife and the environment.

“We continue to actively manage their use.

“We highlight best practice for colleagues in reusing elastic bands through our internal communication channels to avoid unintended littering.”