I’ve always put rubbish in my pocket and kept it until I can find a bin after seeing a Sesame street segment about it as a young kid.
But when I smoked I did sometimes drop my butts on the ground. Normally I would keep hold of them if I was near a public bin as most of them have ashtrays in the top I could dispose of them in.
Coincidentally I’ve noticed that l, at least locally to me, the council have replaced those bins with ones with no ashtrays which has definitely increased the number of butts on the ground. Wonder if having them is seen as encouraging smoking.
But sometimes if I wasn’t near a public bin I’d drop my cig, stub it out and leave it on the ground. I used to smoke hand rolled cigarettes with no filter, just tobacco and paper. I justified it to myself saying it would biodegrade but it still can’t have been good for the environment.
My city now mandates by law that we have to put recyclable materials in the recycling bin and compost in the green bin. You can and will get fined if you don’t and they do check, for households at least, because the vast majority of restaurants, offices, hell city-owned public places like parks, transit stations, libraries, etc do not have a green bin and many don’t even have a recycling bin. I’ve directly been told to just throw it in the trash. Biodegradable packaging is useless 99% of the time because there is no compost bin to put it in and they end up in the landfill anyway.
It’s what I like to call environmental theatre and pinning the burden of waste sorting entirely on the individual instead of seeing it as an infrastructure and access problem requiring government action. Not even a lot of action either, just buy some dollar store trash cans and put them in places since you already have a comprehensive city-wide recycling and compost collection program.
Sometimes I feel pretty lucky to have grown up in Vermont. Because this is the norm, hell we even have a state holiday where we all go out and pick up trash that Flatlanders leave. And then I remember oh wait we are also the state that’s been destroying our forests and farm land for the sake of building suburban homes for litter bugs that don’t respect the culture that was already here.
one thing i cant stand are the people that bag up their dog shit, and then leave it on a trail. immediate mood ruiner when im trying to enjoy the wonders of our planet… and i see a plastic bag of dog shit. like, you’re doing more harm than good and youre probably aware of that very fact. these people are the human equivalent of dog shit.
It would be more environmentally friendly to just leave the dog shit alone instead of putting it in a bag first if you’re just gonna leave it on the ground still.
Fr poop is natural and it does a pretty good job at promoting plaint growth. Hell it’s not like your going to come across poop from racoons or deer. Hell I’m Shure if you were to go off trail it’s likely you might come across a half eaten deer. Poop is just as natural as death.
Poop is quite good at spreading disease though, which is also natural. A sustainable animal population leaving poop is different than a hiking trail that adds quite a bit to the load of poop the environment has to handle.
I once did this because i knew i was going to walk past that spot again and didnt want to carry it the whole time. no one was on that trail that day. and i brought it back out one the return a few hours later. (there were no trash cans out there.) Perhaps something similar was going on with you? Or am I a bad guy?
I wonder how many people have the same idea as you but then just forget when they walk back. On top of this, they never remember that they forgot so they have a guilty free conscious and do again.
If you’re confident you always pick it back up 100% of the time then great! But I wouldn’t do it because I’m dumb and would forget like 10% of the time.
Shit Trees. Dunno if it’s common in the rest of the world but a lot of Brit dog owners tie them to tree and buch branches. Then in winter you have Shit Trees & Turd Bushes.
Looking at Japan and Vermont it really seems like solution to the litter problem is making a culture of politeness. We really need some physiatrists to study what makes a society polite. Like what makes groups of people become polite.
It’s the same as the Shopping Cart theory. There are a few analogous theories, but they’re all the same. If you don’t return your grocery cart, pick up your pet’s poop, or hold your trash till you find a disposal then you’re an asshole.
My crippled ass limps and canes my way to the nearest provided spot.
If I can do this with one leg that barely works, two bad knees, a bad back, and after a half hour+ of misery stumping around a grocery store, nobody not in a chair has an excuse. And it ain’t that hard to return a cart in a chair.
Returning trolleys was the norm in England during the 90s. I dunno what the fuck happened for everyone to suddenly start refusing to return them. Maybe the employment of trolley collectors made people lazy?
Winds me up though. I always return them and make sure to return any nearby ones.
We have a beautiful small Mediterranean Pine forest near my home. Filled to the brim with small black plastic bags filled with dog poop. I think I even took pictures of it once. Enjoy nature!
Lots of the bags are bio-degradable, so they will eventually, in some unit of months or years, break down.
Of course, its the same issue as chucking a banana peel. It fucks with the local environment and will take a long time to be “gone” if you just throw it into a forest and walk away. Enough people do that, and eventually you have a trail covered in shit and bananas.
Important point: “Biodegradable” plastic doesn’t biodegrade in the same way as something like a banana. It disinitegrates to the point that it is invisible to humans, but it introduces microplastics into the environment.
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