At first I thought maybe it was just my neighborhood. I've lived here for 7 years now, it's sort of a mixed neighborhood in terms of housing patterns, but the problem seems to just keep getting worse. I woke up this morning to find 2 Red Bull cans and a Pabst Blue Ribbon can on the grass pedestrian strip in front of our house. With a sigh, I picked them up and disposed of them in my recyclable container. It happens at least once a week. Mostly, it happens at night. But not always.
Today, as I stepped outside at dawn to find the most recent litter, it made my heart shrink just a little bit more. I looked around and noticed litter in front of my neighbors' homes as well...not a lot, but not a little, neither. It was, however, as if I were looking at it with fresh eyes. Like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water, this problem has been getting worse...and I only today realized how bad it is. Later in the day, while I was working in the yard, a kid drove by and tossed a fully loaded bag of McDonalds trash out of his window...the cap to his drink exploded off of the cup and careened several feet...the hamburger wrappers and fries container spilled out...and the next car behind him ran right over it. I knew I had to write this.
We have seen the politics take an ugly turn to the early sixties of late with respect to the latest brouhaha over medical insurance and birth control. Frigging birth control!! Who would have thought we would still be ruminating, as a nation, on that seemingly settled issue in 2012? I don't want to suggest that litter is in any as urgent an issue as access to birth control...but it is similar, in my mind, for this reason...
We thought we had settled this decades ago. We introduced bottle bills, deposits, had Public Service Ads on it...Earth Day was created...and we all felt like we had turned that page. Well...we have not turned that page. It's worse now than it ever was, after a couple decades of improvement. I think it's time for the government to call Central Casting, request another elderly Native American in full costume, and begin another ad blitz, because, clearly, the eye has been taken off of the ball, and there is a new generation of litterbugs who are trashing our streets and neighborhoods.
Maybe it's just me, but there's something almost shocking about watching someone blatantly litter, as the young adult I described above did. To throw a whole bag of trash out the window of your car as you are driving down a residential street...it speaks, somehow, of a latent hostility...a lack of respect or care for the community that is almost defiant and threatening. It suggests a degree or disconnectedness and alienation from ones environment that I just can't relate to.
I makes me angry and sad at the same time. There have been times when, if I could, I would have waved my magic wand, disabled the offender's car, yanked him out (it's almost always a guy) and given him a very rough McDonalds trash enema. This is why I could never run for public office...I enjoy poetic justice too much.
Hitting the Google, I discovered that it's not just perception, it's reality. Communities all over the United States and, indeed, the world, are struggling with a noted resurgence of litter. It's not just that there are more of us now than there were 4 decades ago...we eat differently. We have become, quite literally, a fast food culture, and fast food equals trash. London, England, seems to be wrestling especially hard with the problem of litter, and the people involved in the fight there have estimated that fully one third of the trash that finds itself littering the streets there comes from just one source: McDonalds restaurants. To which I would say...no, it actually comes from McDonalds' customers. If McDonalds reduced it's packaging mass by fifty percent, it's customers' would still throw what's left onto the street. That is by no means an argument for McDonalds to not reduce it's packaging. It's just pointing the blame where it belongs.
In North Carolina, the Dept. of Transportation, which seems to be the state agency throughout the country that reports most frequently on litter statistics, the DOT has said that litter volume has increased 50% since the middle of the 90's. Agencies in Texas report similar statistics. It's not going to please some people here, but there is a profile for your typical litterbug. For those who don't like it it, all I can say is deal with it. As I do...everytime I pick up a Red Bull can from my front lawn.
This "litterbug profile" comes from research done by, among others, the organization Keep America Beautiful:
*Male, 16-24 yrs of age
*eats fast food at least twice per week (how about once a day?)
*never been married
*smoker
Here are some more stats, to paint an even bleaker picture:
*Most littering occurs within 6 yards of a public trash can.
*4.5 trillion cigarette butts are littered each year
*more than one half of all litter is deliberate
*people don't litter when they think no one is watching...69% of deliberate litterers are accompanied by one or more people.
http://www.greenecoservices.com/...
Look...I don't intend this diary to be a "beat up on Millennial, slacking, littering MoFos."
But I am going to suggest that litter is a serious problem, and one that's getting worse. I am going to suggest that younger people are responsible for the majority of this litter. And I am going to suggest that we, as a country, once had a focus on this problem...as evidenced by the add above, and many others that were sponsored by Keep America Beautiful and the Environmental movement in general.
We go bottle bills passed in Michigan, Oregon and other states...progress was made. A lot of progress, in fact. A whole green movement was borne. Except that, it seems, we let up. Just like the fight over birth control, we thought we had won this one. We didn't. How long has it been since anyone has seen any sort of PSA about littering? 1970?
Well...guess what...it's a fight you can't win. It's a fight you have to keep fighting...just like abortion and birth control. As soon as you let up and think it's been settled, the worm turns.
We need new, hard hitting Public Service Ads on littering. I would suggest firmer fines against littering, but the ones on the books are pretty good...they are just never enforced. And I don't even think fines are the best answer, when it comes to a carrot and stick approach to the problem. Especially with young people...and that's where our current problem lies.
Make the punishment fit the crime, and forget the fine. Chances are, if the offender is under 21, someone else will pay that fine anyway. Make them pick up trash, and clean up urban streams. Make the offenders wear some lame looking Tshirts that announce them as litterbugs. It's shame, I'll wager, and not a fine, that will make the most impact.
But something has to be done...if I see one more car drive down the street and toss a bag full of trash out the window, I am going to go off. This is my home. My neighborhood. This is where I live. I care about this place. And I can't, for the life of me, comprehend others who don't feel the same way. If they are incapable of feeling either self pride, or civic pride, or anything resembling civic responsibility...then fuck 'em. I have no use for them, and neither does anyone I know. Let them move to their own neighborhood, and pile the trash as high as they like.
I'm tired of picking up after them...and tired of their assumption that just because someone has, in the past, always picked up after them, that in the future it will be the same.