Fed up with the sea of broken glass bottles littering the town and creating both an eyesore and a safety issue, the council wrote to Minister for Alcohol Policy David Tollner last week demanding action.

“I’m sick of it and so are our residents,” Mayor Fay Miller said.

“It’s well past the time that a line in the sand must be drawn.”

The council has invested more than $8000 to buy two specialised pedestrian vacuum sweepers to combat the problem but Ms Miller said she did not believe it was fair to burden Katherine’s small ratepayer base with the clean-up bill for what was a widespread issue.

In an attempt to tackle the problem in its own town, the Tennant Creek Liquor Accord  successfully lobbied a wine manufacturer in 2013 to produce two “lower-end” wines in plastic bottles, a move Tennant Creek Hotel publican Jordan Jenkins said had made a “huge difference”.

“There was too much smashed glass around,” he said.

“People were complaining about it and it was costing council to deal with it.

“[Plastic wine bottles] have worked well out here and we don’t talk about wine in terms of need to restrict it now.”

Mr Jenkins admitted being an independent retailer helped in the plastic push and said he was not sure how successful it would be with some of Katherine’s chain-owned bottle shops.

Ms Miller said she believed the Tennant Creek  model was worth investigating and slammed the “negligent” NT government for “leaving all decisions about alcohol issues to each region separately”.

Katherine resident Shaun Coutts labelled the problem as “totally unacceptable” and said a solution needed to be found.

“It’s always been an issue but everyone keeps duck-shoving responsibility for it,” he said.

Member for Katherine Willem Westra van Holthe said he understood the community’s frustration but added that it was “not an easy issue to grapple with”.

“I think glass around our towns, our communities, is an issue that comes and goes,” he said.

“It’s very difficult, I think, to regulate in any meaningful way to prevent the sale of glass containers without imposing unreasonable impositions on both manufacturers and retailers.”

Mr Tollner has been invited to visit Katherine to discuss the issue with the council and community stakeholders.