3.5 tonnes of laughing gas canisters picked up during Notting Hill Carnival clean up

The large number of nitrous oxide drums have to be separated from other waste for safety purposes, which is proving to be a time-consuming task.

Crews expect by Friday to have collected four full canisters – of more than 1,000 canisters containing the gas with the street name “hippy crack”.

SUEZ UK said its teams have been working around the clock to clear the area and have faced “unprecedented challenges this year due to police barricades and a high volume of nitrous oxide canisters, which have to be they are separated by hand for security purposes”.

Gary O’Hagan, head of the Notting Hill clean-up operation for the waste management company, said the sheer volume of canisters was “mind-boggling” and causing “a real problem” for crews.

“Canisters must be manually separated from general waste as they can explode if compacted, posing a serious health and safety risk.

“This has significantly slowed down the operation and we will have to rethink the way we collect next year. By Friday we will likely have filled four containers with over a thousand or more canisters.”

The Standard understands that close to five tonnes are expected to be collected by Friday.

Kensington and Chelsea councilor Emma Will said: “Carnivals are a wonderful reflection of our diverse, multicultural community, but we also want to get the streets back to normal as quickly as possible with minimal disruption.

“The 200 crew members have been significantly slowed down by the sheer volume of canisters, but are still working hard to complete the cleanup as quickly as possible.”

SUEZ UK has received complaints from local residents about the time it has taken to clear the streets, with one person claiming on Twitter that it has been “terrible”.

More than 200 waste collectors and street cleaners worked to clean up the area and recycle 30 percent of all waste.

It is estimated that around 300 tons of waste have been collected.

Kensington and Chelsea Council said the huge amount of discarded food containers, drink cans and nitrous oxide canisters weighed as much as 25 double-decker buses in London.

Laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, is an increasingly popular drug. Doctors in the UK have issued a warning about a rise in patients being admitted to hospital after it, following a series of warnings from the police.

Specialist neurologists and toxicologists have found there has been a 257 per cent increase in serious poisonings from gas abuse, with young people being admitted to emergency departments roughly every two weeks, according to the Independent.

In a 2019-20 Crime Survey for England and Wales, almost 9 percent of 16-24-year-olds said they had taken nitrous oxide in the past year, an increase of 6.1 percent from 2012-13, the Guardian reported. .