A few weeks ago, I brought a shopping bag out on a walk/hike with me. I'd decided to pick up trash along the way. The route goes up a pretty well-used one-lane road to a large county park. I thought maybe I'd get 6-12 big items I noticed on a previous walk.
Picking up trash and recycling (and certainly NOT throwing litter out of your vehicle) is something we learned pretty well as kids. Our Mom was living "reduce, reuse, recycle" way before it was even a thing. Combine that with an anal-retentive person's penchant for cleaning and the way my eyes can notice almost anything that appears out of place and I turned into a very busy trash-grabbing pedestrian on this walk.
I filled the entire shopping bag and then some. Here's a smattering of what I picked up:
- 3-4, 40oz beer bottles, kudos big drinkers!
- 12+, aluminum beer cans, all crushed by foot to hold more in the bag
- 2-3, 12oz beer bottles
- A handful of the mini "airline" liquor bottles
- 1, Co2 canister, presumably from a cyclist (these are not at all recyclable, please get a hand pump)
- 1, Sports Gel wrapper, the Untapped brand, also likely from a cyclist.
- 1, Crushed & broken plastic hubcap, more like 20 pieces of a hubcap
- 1, Trojan wrapper, opened & empty, bowm-chick-a-bowm-bowm!
- 1, Microfiber cloth
- .75, Red Solo cup
- 1, Starbucks hot cup, Grande
- 1, Starbucks iced cup, Venti
- 1, Blanket (I have to go back for this)
- 1, Six-pack can ring keeper, white
- 1, Petzel headlight lithium-ion battery (I'd picked up the crushed mount/headstrap about a week earlier)
- 20, Various pieces of plastic/mail/debris/paper/etc.
And this was collected in only 2/10 of a mile! Almost no distance at all. And in case you were wondering that same thing I was - "Where did you throw all that trash, MK?" The county park has many large trash bins in the park, and they post-sort and recycle all items after leaving the park. If I hadn't seen this sign, I might have walked it all back down the hill for the trash at home.
Oh, and there was one more king can for me to grab IN THE TRASH BIN! Lovely.
Since I had a lot of time while walking, I began to think about the mind of a litterbug. Why do they do this? What could make them stop? Etc. Here are three of my categories:
> Accidental Litterbugs
These litterbugs don't know that they're littering, and I like to think they'd go back and pick it up if they did know. Of course, I'm sure some of them are littering on purpose, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt in this case. An example of this litterbug could be: You're careening down the mountain on your bike (it is fast and bumpy) and your headlight falls out of your back pocket or fanny pack. You never knew you lost it until the end of your ride. Same could happen to the energy gel wrapper or the Co2 canister. I think it also happens to the car hubcap - around a tight turn, your hubcap pops off in the middle of the night as you're heading home. You don't even notice it's gone. Days later, many other cars pulverize this hubcap into dozens of pieces on the side of the road. Ok, fine, I get it. The last group are people that have actually thrown away their trash, but the garbage person handling their trash lets some of it inadvertently blow away during pickup. Kind of straddling this "accidental" line, but ok.
> Avoid-Trouble Litterbugs
This took me a few minutes to figure out, but I think I can at least understand this litterbug. You've got a 40oz beer bottle in your car, maybe are underage, and simply don't want an open container in your vehicle once down the mountain. So, you chuck it out the window as you go down. You're getting rid of the evidence. I mean, there are actually more serious violations happening with this litterbug than littering, but ok, I guess I understand this one.
> Lazy Litterbugs
In my opinion this is the worst type of littering offender. This is someone that's simply too lazy, ignorant, stupid or a combination thereof, to put their garbage in a trash can. I actually really dislike this type of litterbug and cannot understand what they're thinking. As someone that can understand not wanting trash in my own car, I cannot understand why you can't simply put it to the side for the rest of your (short) drive and dispose of it once home or at your destination. Lazy.
So, what's the solution?
I've had some time to think about that too. I thought about purchasing a ghillie suit (Google it), sitting in the woods near the sides of the roads and leaping out to catch people in the act. That might get the wrong kind of response though, especially if they're packing heat. I thought about buying a bunch of motion-activated game cameras (used by hunters) and catching people in the act, then handing the footage in to the police. Not only is the cost prohibitive, but I'm guessing the police have better things to do. My last gasp attempt at a solution is pretty simple and I suspect will work - place some county garbage cans at the small turnouts on the road down the hill. Hopefully people who are already stopping and already removing trash from their cars will simply place it in the proper receptacle.
In any case, let's hope most of our worlds litterbugs are the first kind, and not the last. Of course, as I drove up this route the following Monday morning, I noticed new trash, but it turned out to be only a plastic bag that had blown in. I went back for that blanket and bag, and wound up with a whole other shopping bag filled with garbage (some was really hiding the first time I collected). Sneaky trash.
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