'It's time for ALL of us to clear up Dustbin Britain': JEREMY PAXMAN issues rallying cry as Mail launches this year's great clear up

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It’s all Nathaniel Wyeth’s fault. You may, perhaps, have heard of his brother, the painter Andrew Wyeth, who is far more likely to pop up in a University Challenge question than his geeky sibling.

If you are a real enthusiast for American art, you may even have heard of his artist father or his artist sisters. But it is the quiet scientist, Nathaniel, who has had the biggest impact on the planet.

Nathaniel Wyeth used to call himself ‘the unknown one’, to mark out his obscurity in comparison with his famous artist family. He spent most of his adult life as a research scientist drone in a multinational chemical company.

And in doing that he changed all our lives.

You can spend your whole life in contented ignorance of his family’s paintings. But you will assuredly see uncountable numbers of Nathaniel’s contribution to modern life.

Jeremy Paxman, pictured, has issued a rallying cry for all of us to start clearing up dustbin Britain

We have somehow turned this useful substance into a blight on the planet which is doing far more damage than machine guns ever did. Pictured: a seal who got a plastic frisbee stuck around her neck, causing a deep incision

For while The Beatles were recording Sergeant Pepper in 1967, Nathaniel Wyatt was wondering whether fizzy drinks could be carried around in lightweight containers. It took him a few years in a DuPont lab to get the design and chemical formula right, but by 1973 he had invented and patented the plastic bottle.

Nathaniel Wyatt retired soon after, having given the world a sort of freedom. And how we loved it!

One of the characteristics of modern life is how much of it is lived on the move.

‘Shall I grab us a couple of coffees?’ a colleague shouts, before returning with a disposable container which magically doesn’t leak. If you have time for them, lunches are eaten in cars, supper is a sandwich on a train.

Plastic bottles, plastic tops and linings to coffee cups and plastic wrappings on food make life liveable. Last year alone, we used more than 13 billion plastic bottles in Britain.

There is nothing inherently wrong with synthetic plastic. When the Victorian scientist Alexander Parkes invented the first man-made plastic he wasn’t setting out to make a killing machine, like his fellow resident of South Norwood cemetery, Hiram Maxim, creator of the machine gun.

But we have somehow turned this useful substance into a blight on the planet which is doing far more damage than machine guns ever did.

Once upon a time, plastic was full of promise. It was cheap and light and could be made into just about any shape. It was waterproof and protected food from contamination. In the early days, it was even seen as an instrument of female liberation because women no longer needed some simian male to lift things for them.

How did it all go wrong?

It didn’t happen by chance. We made it go wrong, because we’re stupid and idle and thoughtless. It’s too easy to blame manufacturers of sweet, fizzy drinks for the problem.

For sure, we should all do something to persuade the dimwits at drink companies to think of containers that won’t trouble our great-grandchildren. If Coca-Cola is part of the problem, it’s unlikely to be part of the solution.

But litter isn’t their problem. It’s ours. It is not the manufacturers who chuck the empty bottles onto the roadside. It is us. Someone you know is almost certainly an anti-social yob. It’s reckoned that over half of Britain’s plastic bottles end up being recycled. Which means that nearly half of them are not. Billions of plastic bottles are, therefore, being tipped into the ground, burned, or left to contaminate the countryside.

Think back to the places you loved as a child — fields, hills, rivers or parks. If you experienced them before Dr Wyeth made his discovery in the Sixties, you probably recall them looking much the same as they had for generations. Perhaps for centuries.

Today, unless you are lucky enough to have a conscientious local authority or team of litter volunteers, the place you fondly remember is likely to be strewn with rubbish. Beauty spots have an odd effect on some people, causing them to create ugliness. Weirdly, homo sapiens seems to have developed an urge to foul his own nest.

How did it all go wrong? It didn’t happen by chance. We made it go wrong, because we’re stupid and idle and thoughtless. Pictured: a mallard duck entangled in plastic in Richmond Park, south west London

We have all seen the photos of dogs, cats, turtles suffering pain or starvation after being snared or poisoned by waste plastics, whether bottles, jars, fishing nets or even, sometimes, fibres of plastic so small that they are virtually invisible to the human eye. We may not kill them intentionally, yet as a species we do it anyway.

Plastic on the ground gets washed into watercourses and then rivers, and from there into the sea. Those plastic bottles along the tide-line at your favourite beach could have come from more-or-less anywhere.

In fact, last year, a Mail investigation, headlined ‘Dustbin of the World’, revealed that plastic items washed up on a Cornish beach had come from as far afield as North Korea and Florida.

Not only that, one toy plastic ship discovered in the Arctic recently started life in a British cereal packet in 1958 — proof, if proof were needed, that plastic is designed to be well-nigh indestructible. That’s why areas like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous expanse of ocean roughly twice the size of France, survives from year to year, with rubbish washing from one side of the ocean to the other. And that is just what we can see.

Plastic pollution is now so widespread that, as Frank Kelly, professor of environmental health at King’s College, London, revealed in the Mail only a few months ago, we are now all breathing in microscopic particles of plastic, with no idea of what they may be doing to us.

Environmentalists often sound like their own worst enemies, because they have spent so long crying ‘wolf’ that one might as well grind their sandals to dust and mould them into earplugs.

So what if they predict — as they do — that within 30 years there will be a greater volume of plastic in the sea than there will be fish? Perhaps they’re right, but we cannot comprehend it, simply because we have never before had to live with detritus that goes on more-or-less for ever. As a mere citizen, it reduces you to a feeling of utter powerlessness.

If you bought a packet of peanuts in the Sixties, they came in a paper bag. Now, the bag is coated with plastic. The manufacturers have chosen to do it for understandable reasons — it keeps the peanuts inside dry and clean. But the plastic remains virtually indestructible, and we seem to have no choice in that.

If we have a sudden craving for peanuts, our grandchildren will be living with the container long after we are providing food for worms. The snack we enjoyed was gone in minutes. We didn’t buy the packet as some sort of legacy gift, but the wrapping it came in will be there for decades.

And it is not just self-righteous environmentalists in shapeless jumpers who predict Armageddon. Common sense tells us that if every year increasing quantities of this toxic material end up lying about the place, then sooner or later it will engulf us. There is trouble ahead.

I cannot do anything about the plastic bags which litter the deserts of the Middle East or the bottles, drainpipes and jars that float down the Yangtze River in China.

But I can do something about the garbage that is piling up at the sides of British highways. I can begin by not adding to it.

The other day, walking half a mile on a country lane six miles from the nearest town, I picked up four plastic bottles, two McDonald’s wrappers, two fish-and-chip shop styrofoam trays, six chocolate wrappers, three cigarette packets, two plastic hubcaps, the back of a mobile phone, assorted bits of unidentifiable junk and a plastic doll’s leg.

Doubtless, there was some story attached to each of the items. Collectively, they tell no story beyond the contamination of the countryside.

We have all seen morons throwing trash from their cars. Why do they do it? Presumably they do it because they don’t want it in their cars. But they are too stupid to understand that jettisoning it from their vehicle merely means that it becomes a problem for everyone, and that everyone includes them.

Fifty years ago, this problem did not exist. It’s outrageous. Are we really content to live like this? Pictured: a seahorse clinging on to a cotton bud with its tail

We live in a beautiful country and we have all probably done something to disfigure it. We are lucky that nature is forgiving. But the strange contradiction of plastic is that while most of it is intended for temporary use, it can live on for centuries.

Research has established that if you allow litter to accumulate, not only does it cost us all a fortune to remove, but it affects our behaviour. A litter-strewn environment makes depression more likely. And when a place is mucky, crime and anti-social behaviour get worse, as if those with bad intent are uneasy in places which are cared for.

If you think about all this long enough, you could get awfully depressed. But we have not yet reached the point of no return. We don’t have to live like this. We can still make a start on clearing it up.

It is abundantly clear that the only thing that will achieve a lasting improvement is ‘behavioural change’.

Once upon a time, people thought nothing of having ‘one for the road’ and driving home legless. We need a similar change of attitudes in this case, so that the idea of dropping litter — and especially plastic litter — would never enter people’s heads.

Before we can do that, we need to recognise the seriousness of the problem, which is rooted in the fact that some people just don’t see litter.

Above all, though, we need to tackle the problem of plastic. We can all make a difference: we could start the next time we have a coffee by refusing any single-use plastic container.

And we have to start making a noise.

Someone (are you listening, Michael Gove?) needs to take responsibility for the unglamorous job of cleaning up this place.

There is virtually no evidence that the Government takes litter seriously. Highways England has a statutory duty to ‘keep highways clear of litter’. It isn’t doing so, but there is no sign that any minister is prepared to lift a finger.

How many times have you seen a waste lorry driving along, as bits of rubbish fly out of the back? It happens every week.

Fifty years ago, this problem did not exist. It’s outrageous. Are we really content to live like this?

Jeremy Paxman is Patron of Clean Up Britain.