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Northampton photographer capturing rubbish in town streets

BBC Woman wearing yellow with small purple hat take picture of brown sofa on its sideBBC
Khandie has photographed everything from food waste to sofas in Northampton

A photographer has turned her camera to fly-tipping on the streets with the hope of highlighting the issue.

Khandie, as the photographer likes to be known, started the project after noticing how bad the problem was in the town centre.

She has even captured rubbish being dumped next to signs saying that fly-tipping is illegal.

West Northamptonshire Council said there have been 16,700 incidents of fly-tipping in the last year.

She hopes that her pictures of abandoned furniture and rotting food will get the local council to act.

She said: "I started to notice the collection of rubbish that was piling up on the regular and some of the more unusual dumpings and thought it was quite comical at first in a kind of sad way, so I started capturing it."

@khandiephoto Black and white mattress lies outside a terraced house@khandiephoto
Khandie has found large objects like mattresses abandoned on pavements

"I couldn't believe how much [rubbish] there was, considering there's so many council initiatives here, but it became quite prevalent that they weren't working, so I started taking pictures of it to highlight it to say 'look, you say that you've got all these people working but why are they missing all this rubbish?'"

@khandiephoto A pile of boxes and bags full of rubbish on the pavement of a Northampton street@khandiephoto
Khandie said she wanted to know why council workers are missing all this rubbish

Khandie said the list of objects was endless: "Sofas, beds, mattresses are pretty prevalent, fridge freezers, broken TVs, people's luggage, hair extensions, a lot of gas canisters - big ones, not just the little silver ones, broken toys, car parts.

"There's lots of commercial rubbish, like there was a whole, looked like, a hairdresser's chemical thing which was just dumped."

@khandiephoto Yellow and red "little tikes" car on its side on a pavement@khandiephoto
Khandie's picture of an abandoned toy car grabbed a lot of attention

One particular image made Khandie realise she had to do something: "I took a picture of the "Little Tikes" car that was yellow and red and it was rolled over on its side.

"I started selling a few prints and I did donate all the money to a charity because it was a bit silly, but then I started to realise that, if I ignore it, I'm becoming part of the problem."

Phil Larratt, West Northamptonshire Council's cabinet member for the environment, said: "People seem to blame the council for fly-tipping, but it's not the council who goes out and dumps rubbish. We despise it as much as everybody else."

"We're having success with prosecutions, we're engaging with CCTV to identify and take action against people who do this.

"We have our own CCTV, unfortunately we did deploy some not so very long ago and it got stolen."

Cost of clearance over £800K

West Northamptonshire Council said that more than 4,000 incidents of fly-tipping on pavements or footpaths were recorded in its area last year.

There were 10,000 reports of rubbish being dumped on council land.

There were 578 "white" electrical goods that were illegally dumped, along with 243 tyres and 23 animal carcasses.

The council said the cost of clearance and disposal was around £843,290.

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