It’s just basic civil behaviour
That sadly, many choose not to do.:-(
It’s probably bad parenting, but I tell my daughter that people who litter are bad people. I can probably put it better, but she’s young, simple is good, and so litterers=bad people. I honestly think that to essentially be true, because if you litter, you’ve essentially internally rationalized your entitlement to make your shit someone else’s problem. Right there with people who don’t put their carts back.
That being said, I do also say to her that sometimes the wind will carry trash from a receptacle, and that sometimes folks have difficulty ambulating, and so there are exceptions.
I mean shit, maybe hold off on the concept of “bad people”? I get simpler is better but teaching “it is routine and normal for us to categorize lots of people into the category of ‘bad people’” is forming a pretty significant building block in her philosophy.
Unless you’re doing some kind of jesus thing where bad people can still be friends or neighbors because being bad doesn’t mean being worthless or something like that. But that’s pretty complicated too.
I have never thrown trash on the ground in my life. I cannot imagine who was brought up to think that’s ok.
I’m going to rant here because your comment re-ignited my rage.
My family and I have weekly dinners. I drive over there and pass through their neighborhood. They own a successful business so it’s a pretty nice neighborhood with a good median of trees down the main road passing through (still a 25 MPH speed limit). And every week for several years now, there is a discarded Pepsi can in the median. Not the same can, but a new can every week. Someone drives through there, likely multiple times a week and I’m just not there to see it, and throws a Pepsi can in roughly the same spot.
It enrages me. It’s so senseless and selfish that I cannot even fathom a reason. My best justification is that they’re a person who is “sticking it to the rich” by littering in a nice neighborhood, but that’s being extremely generous. I am convinced it’s purposeful because the consistency is staggering. A new can in the same 100 feet of road, every day.
And I know it’s not the same can because if it snows, the snow obscures the cans and the poor hero picking them up can’t see them, so when the snow melts there are several cans littered about.
It genuinely makes me so angry, because it’s so inexplicably terrible. I just hate things I can’t understand. It makes me more angry than Donald Trump because at least with Trump, on some level I get it. I may hate what he’s doing but I can logically see why he’s doing it and that understanding is almost calming, in a sense.
But this? Absolute nonsense. I just cannot see why someone would do this
I think Hanlon’s Razor probably applies. It’s likely just some person enjoying a Pepsi at the end of the day and throwing it out because they’ll pile up in their car otherwise.
Laziness is something that’s lauded in this day and age, they likely just don’t understand that what they’re doing is wrong.
I could be wrong, but most people aren’t malicious.
The fact of most people not being malicious isn’t much insulation from malice. One malicious person is enough to create a can wave.
If someone wanted to be malicious (and like you’re saying start a wave) something tells me that throwing a single Pepsi can out of their window periodically is one of the least effective ways to do it.
Probably not, but maybe they’re doing it to make sure that guy keeps his job.
I’m pretty sure one of my neighbors is trying to hide their after work (drive home) drinking habit from their spouse. There is a liquor store on the way into my neighborhood and I’m pretty sure they stop there, get several mini shot bottles and drink and toss them as they go on the way home. I pick them up on my walks, but I swear to god if I ever see the asshole do it I’m gonna save them up and leave them on their doorstep with a note.
See alcohol I could “get” but Pepsi? Who has a Pepsi addiction
I know someone who does. He lost all his teeth by 30. No water ever, only pepsi. Though, given the rest of his diet, he may have literally had scurvy, so it could have been that, or a combination of the two issues.
I’ll admit it, though I’m not proud of it. I used to throw trash out the car window all of the time when I was in highschool (idk if I thought it was funny, or I was being cool, or just truly didn’t consider it). It hurts to think about my dumbass doing that in the past, but it happened
Now I don’t even throw my cigarette butts on the ground. I twist them out and put them in my pocket until I can find a proper trash can. I pick up other litter when I can and even raked an entire campsite of beer cans/trash thrown around (I was just hiking and stumbled upon it, but I couldn’t leave it without doing something). So hopefully I’ve earned a little good-litter-karma back for all the fuckery I caused as a dumb teen
It’s amazing how complete my mind felt when I was a teenager, and then how incomplete it looks in retrospect as I realize how little consideration I gave to consequences of actions.
Like, I remember moments when friends and I ruined this or that, then had some adult say something like “somebody has to fix that now”.
I’d be like “yeah duh” like I knew this fact, but somehow it wasn’t real to me. Consequences were just a blank.
I think one of the weird things about the human mind is we have this kind of words-only knowledge and we have this fully real knowledge, and we tend to confuse the one for the other so easily and often.
“Do you know X?”
“Yes I know that”
But then it never enters into your actions because you only “know it” in words, the same way you know something like “An AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun”. It’s a perfectly comprehensible fact with no visceral reality to it.
When I was a teenager, consequences were words-only knowledge for me.
Well, besides eventual differences in cognitive ability, this probably has a lot more to do with that a lot of teenagers today aren’t responsible for much at all. In smaller communities, you see the event chain much clearer. You probably know who has to fix the ruined thing. Perhaps you even have to help out yourself. To put it simply, you don’t shit where you drink. This of course presupposes that the small community is a community to begin with; connections and relations between people and their environment need work, need to be maintained.
In a modern context or a larger city, you have much less of an immediate connection to the consequences of breaking, say, a streetlight. Someone else has to clean it up, someone else has to fix it, and they probably get paid for doing so anyway. And this is the typical attitude of everyone around you, this is what you learn.
But to turn this around, most of the environment around you in modern society actually has nothing to do with you. In an urban environment, not much is “yours” and you have little direct investment in anything. You’re a guest in your own living space. And with this in mind, why should you care about some streetlight? Or some building you’re not even allowed to enter? Or a street full of billboards for products other people make money from?
I only did it once when I was young and my uncle gave me the stare and told me to pick it up and put it in my pocket. That’s really all it took to teach me it was wrong amd have never littered since, at least not intentionally.
They’re about to get crushed?
Is it bad that I think like that all the time? I still do the right thing, but I’m worried that one day I’ll just see no change and get into the “fuck it” mindset.
In actual civilised countries, people do think like that, teach their kids to think like that, and call out people who don’t respect their environment.
It’s a societal problem at your end probably
When I was young kids would actually get mad if someone wasn’t being a tidy kiwi. It was so ingrained in us to not litter and pick up litter. I remember seeing a young girl scolding an adult for throwing his cigarette on the ground.
This is why you need to focus on local change as the goal. By local I mean right there and then. You pick up some trash or you prevent your own from going on the ground, the change is right there in front of you: that section of ground, at that time, is clean.
If you do the small things with big changes in mind as the reason, it’s a recipe for exactly the kind of burnout you’re referring to.
There is change. It’s just small. But it’s 100% real and right there in front of you and it reliably follows from your action.
True. I teach my son that, too.
Be the change you want to see in the world
And fuck everyone else
I’m holding on hard.
Sure, it’s only garbage people who litter. But don’t forget that it was lobby of the plastic industry who overemphasized the waste and recycling system as a solution to pollution, as opposed to reducing consumption.
In all fairness. It’s nice to have clean spaces as well.
I mean, yes, reducing and reusing are more important.
But in the end if we didn’t recycle, we would eventually run out of resources.
Well, only some plastics can be recycled, and not very well at that. Plastic manufacturers have known this for 50+ years and never told us.
You’re not going to like to learn what the actual statistics are of how much of what we recycle actually gets recycled.
Now, people are fucked up right now in that if you say “X isn’t as effective as you think it is” everyone’s first reply is always “WHY ARE YOU SAYING NOT TO X!!” so just everyone… calm tf down.
Keep recycling, but can we PLEASE put pressure on our elected representatives that we don’t want to have babies made of microplastics so demand that they uphold environmental regulations in their district. Demand more robust investment in recycling, demand incentives to make alternatives to plastics. Demand money be spent where you want it spent, and FURTHERMORE you can actually donate to the institutions of your choice and have that donation tax deducted and get the state to pay for the things you want either way.
There are smarter ways to do all this, just don’t think “I did my part, I don’t need to do any more.” You don’t get out of responsibility here, I don’t care that you didn’t ask to be here, get to work!
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Edit: adjusted link
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In Japan they don’t have public trash cans so if you eat a snack you just shove the wrapper in your pocket until you get home or wherever. You end up with a pocket filled with trash, ha
In Japan I had no idea how to get rid of rubbish. The only way I knew how was to find the Mc Donald’s and throw our trash away there.
I don’t know why they don’t have public bins.
They don’t have them because they were removed after the Tokyo Metro nerve gas attack in 1995 as a precaution against future terrorist attacks. It’s a pretty common response to terror attacks, France did it after the 1995 GIA bombings and the UK did it after the 1993 Bishopgate bombing by the Provisional IRA.
Anti-public cost cutting disguised as security theater
Dam that’s a bit of an over reaction imo.
Wait, do you mean to tell me they don’t have public trash bins in France or the UK either? Or did they bring them back after a while?
They brought them back after a while. Japan has started bringing trash cans back in cities slowly too.
They are afraid of bombs.
In my city center, after a terrorist attack decades ago with a bomb in one of them, all the trash bins were removed and never reinstated.
Everyone knows a bomb can only explode if it’s within a trash can. I’m glad Japan no longer has to worry about this critical issue.
I all seriousness though, by all accounts I’ve heard Japan is very clean. The lack of trash cans is not an excuse people use and things work fine without them.
Its clean but there are a lot of stinky rubbish bags on the side of the road.
That makes the US’s reaction to domestic terrorism almost reasonable.
Apparently we must have had a bomb thing with a bench at some point
Don’t need a terrorist attack when all you need to do is be homeless
Pretty basic, really. City has trashcans everywhere, so one is bound to run into one eventually. It costs literally just as much effort to shove that wrapper into your pants pocket as it does to chuck onto the street.
Yes, if a) you were raised with such values? Common sense? Both? And b)if your city has a lot of thrash cans. I’m surrounded by a lack of both so the meme is accurate to the folks that keep trash in their pockets until they get to a trashcan.
Correction: your city has trashcans everywhere
The only public trash can in my neighborhood is at 7-Eleven. Thank god that mega corporate chain is taking their civic duty responsibility seriously because literally nobody else is. No other businesses are willing to do the work of maintaining a trash can, and apparently neither is the city.
Yeah, a public trash can is work. But in my opinion, it’s a worthwhile expenditure of time and effort. The service of being able to toss things in the trash is worth the collective price, IMO.
What else can you do?
I have a mint wrapper in my back pocket from three days ago, I’ve seen countless trash cans. This shit is getting thrown away when I wash em, become one with the trash.
Public trash bins.
I like to go the extra mile by washing and drying my trash before throwing it away. Paper products unfortunately don’t do well in the process and i have to retrieve the from the lint screen.
Sometimes I find garbage in my pockets from months ago :)
You’re welcome.
Thank you
I like that last pocket on my backpack. Mesh pocket like the one for drink bottles, but a more of a flat pocket with no zipper, little tension band at the top. Great for that tissue or what have you.
This could also be “people who put stray carts (trolleys for UKians) in the cart return even if they weren’t the one to use them”
Kek, me with two pockets full of trash. Not all of my own even
If a street is full of trash I don’t bother. But if there’s a nice clean stretch with one bright piece of trash I’ll grab it.
