Love them or loathe them for the family shopper a trolley is an essential piece of supermarket equipment but they can drive you round the bend...

WITH a mind of their own, they are the bane of stressed supermarket shoppers across the country.

Thousands of customers are literally driven round the bend every day by the devices.

Now environmentalists are waging war on the menace of the shopping trolley.

Scores of trolleys are dumped every year in the car parks, streets, derelict land and rivers of Hampshire.

A new campaign has been launched to get abandoned ones wheeled away as part of a crackdown.

Councils across the county have joined forces to press for new legislation to help get rid of them more easily.

Civic chiefs say they have problems disposing of them because of out-dated waste laws which come into force if owners are not identified or they are on private land.

Councillors from Southampton, Gosport and Basingstoke have now signed a joint application to the government to ease the problems.

In recent years, supermarket bosses themselves have taken steps to deter trolley thieves from targeting their stores.

In Hampshire, the Southampton branch of Asda was one of the first to attempt to stem the flow of the disappearing devices.

Their hi-tech system, which uses radio frequencies, helped put the brakes on thieves getting away with trolleys, which had been costing the firm £18,000 a year.

The city store became one of just five branches in the country to be chosen for the scheme, which locks trolley wheels when it crosses a boundary.

A store spokeswoman said: "It's a positive thing for customers as it means more trolleys will be available for them.

"It works on radio frequencies so that when it is pushed past a red line at the front of the store, the wheels lock."

As reported in the Daily Echo, new laws brought in two years ago introduced a power of 'wellbeing' for new legislation to be introduced to improve the environment.

Councillor Richard Williams, Cabinet member for environment and transport at the city council, said: "The new power of 'wellbeing' will make a difference to a number of areas in Hampshire.

"Abandoned shopping trolleys pose a problem everywhere and we hope our application to tackle it is one that other areas will be able to 'wheel in' in the future."

In Southampton alone, about 1,000 abandoned trolleys are rounded up each year.

More than half are dumped in the city's parks and open spaces.

Previous campaigns such as the council's 'trolley posse' have targeted abandoned trolleys and returned them to their owners, but they still pose a major problem.

Council bosses are now hoping their application to the government will help to ensure even more work can be done to remove them.

They say current legislation does not allow for easy disposal of abandoned shopping trolleys as:

They do not fit the legal definition of waste

Supermarkets are not always prepared to pay for their return

Trolleys cannot be disposed of if an owner is not identified or will not pay for its return and trolleys on private land can only be removed with the owners' consent.