OLD furniture, fridges, roofing materials and black bags by the score, they're all part of the menace of fly-tipping, a blight that costs Worcestershire more than £250,000 a year to clear up, while nationally the figure is a breathtaking £100m.

Fly-tipping Awareness Week begins on Monday and, as part of the Countryside Alliance's Fly-tipping - Scrap It' fight-back, country people all over the county are being encouraged to take part by reporting incidents and offenders.

The ultimate aim is to create a "fly-tipping roadmap", which will pin-point the worst locations in an attempt to throttle the menace.

"A recent investigation by the Countryside Alliance has shown that 2.5 million incidents of unlawful rubbish dumping across the UK were recorded in the year up to April 2006," said Clare Rowson, the alliance's Midland regional director.

"The cost to local authorities alone was just under £100 million, yet less than one in 100 cases led to a prosecution. A recent poll also found that 74 per cent of people believe fly-tipping is a bigger abuse of the countryside than polytunnels, light pollution or wind-farms. So this is serious stuff.

"The picture in the Midlands is no better. More than 77,000 incidents have occurred regionally, costing nearly £4m. In Worcestershire alone the statistics make horrifying reading. The cost to the county in those 12 months was £265,655, which is a distressing 4,558 fly-tipping incidents."

By far the most occurred in the Redditch area, where the local authority had to fork out £105,553 to clear away 1,527 cases of illegal dumping.

Worcester city suffered the least, with its 234 incidents costing £10,622 to clean up.

Other examples included Malvern (355 cases costing £19,345), Wychavon (944 cases, £47,502), Bromsgrove (339 cases, £34,354) and Wyre Forest (877 cases, £23,064). In Hereford, the cost was £25,215 to cover 282 incidents "National Fly-tipping Awareness Week aims to raise the profile of this growing problem, with a view to doing something about it," Ms Rowson added.

"Part of the initiative will involve encouraging communities to come together to tackle the problem and shame fly-tippers into stopping.

"Many people believe that fly-tipping is something they can get away with and that the victim is faceless. This is nonsense. If you fly-tip on private land the owner gets the stress of clearing it up and the bill; if you fly-tip on public land the taxpayer gets the bill; and in both instances, as well as breaking the law, people are ruining the beauty of the countryside for everyone.

"Parts of Worcestershire are particularly vulnerable to this blight, because within a short drive of some of the towns there are isolated spots where the contents of a flatbed truck can easily be disposed of. Whether it's a load of old timber or a moth-eaten sofa.

"You don't want to be enjoying a walk along a woodland track and round a corner to be faced by a pile of black plastic bags.

"Fly-tipping is seen as a major problem by more than three-quarters of landowners and affects 67 per cent of farmers.

"Across the country, there is a new incident ever 12 seconds.What is already clear is the human element in all this," Ms Rowson maintained.

"There is existing legislation available to authorities to combat fly-tipping, but that alone is not going to solove the problem.

"What motivates some fly-tippers appears to be a careless attitude by those who would never dream of breaking the law in any other way - and this is something we must work to change.

"Fly-tipping may even seem an increasingly appealing option as households start being charged by the amount of rubbish they produce - the so-called bin tax' - so the situation could get worse before it gets better."

Which is not a happy thought for all those who live and work in the countryside or those who visit it.