A council has issued fines amounting to £1,200 to a couple who tidied rubbish outside their home into a cardboard box.
Veronika Mike, 41, and Zoltan Pinter, 46, from Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, said the street outside their two-bedroom home had been plagued by rubbish for years.
They said they “just wanted to clean” it as people dumped waste around the designated bins that they said was not collected and attracted rats.
On April 29, Mr Pinter decided to clear up his street, filling an old cardboard box with food scraps and discarded packaging to prevent it from blowing around, and leaving it by the bins in the hope that Stoke-on-Trent City Council would collect it.
“I couldn’t put it in the bins because they were full, so I left it beside them,” Mr Pinter said.
He said his name happened to be on the cardboard box and a week later he received a fixed penalty notice for illegal dumping and a £600 fine – as did Ms Mike, despite her name not being on the box.
The letter from City of Stoke-on-Trent Regulatory Services Environmental Crime Unit showed a picture of the box and stated that the fixed penalty notice was for “failing to transfer household waste to an authorised authority”.