Basic Information
Fly tipping is the practice of discarding waste in a space not authorised for that purpose - whether that space is public, or on the land of a third party individual. Fly tipping is distinguished from littering by the quantities involved and by malice of forethought. To empty your car's ashtray by the side of the road is anti-social littering, to fill the boot up with household waste and dump that by the roadside is fly-tipping.
Of course, this relies on there being a concept of places where waste should and should not be dumped - some cultures struggle with this idea, and others adopt it very early on. The transition from nomadism to sedentism may well be involved as waste handling becomes far more of an issue when you can't just move on and leave waste behind. Very often the lack of this distinction leads to a transitional phenomenon more like intensive littering.
In general, fly tipping takes place in out of the way places where the offenders can do their business without being caught at it - either by the landowner, or law enforcement, or anyone else prone to object. Blatant and public tipping tends to require some degree of impunity on the part of the tipper. The largest scale of tipping in the modern era probably consists of sea-dumping - whether municipal waste or industrial chemical materials.
This sort of problem can often result from organised crime getting involved in the waste business - sometimes they actually run legitimate waste operations as fronts (and utilities), but criminals are apt to take shortcuts and may well be tempted to simply tip and run.
Also referenced under disposal of human corpses to represent the anti-social habit of dumping dead people in public places, typically with a view to sending some kind of message.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- Useful in dystopiae to indicate a lack of competent law enforcement.
- Sea dumping can cause all sorts of international annoyance, and might well be a target for some sort of "plausibly deniable action" to dissuade offenders not easily subject to legal action.
- Having waste dumped on your property is always a good source of annoyance.
- Of course, it's entirely possible that the dumped waste may be of some use or interest to those in the target area - one man's truckload of WEEE may turn out to be economically viable recyclables to someone else. Also, your fly tipped domestic waste may be of some help to identity thieves.
- More prosaically, domestic waste is often the easiest for law enforcement to trace to its originator for the same sort of reasons. The actual producer of the waste can then usually be coerced into revealing who they paid to "lose" it.
- Consider some latter day Al Capone - undone for illegal waste tipping rather than tax evasion.
- More prosaically, domestic waste is often the easiest for law enforcement to trace to its originator for the same sort of reasons. The actual producer of the waste can then usually be coerced into revealing who they paid to "lose" it.