There's a small concert pavilion in our town. We pass it on the way to the post office, the library, grocery store, pharmacy, pretty much everywhere. We pass it on foot, on bike, on scooters, in cars and trucks. We go by it every day. 360 days of the year, it's fine. Clean, well kept, and unnoticeable. On the day after a concert, it's bad. When it rains before the concert, and everyone hangs out in their cars, it's horrible. Bags and boxes of beer cans and bottles. Fast food bags full of concert trash. Disposable diapers. Cigarette cartons. I can't take it. I pick up trash on those days. I take three walks: one for cans, one for other recycling, and one for genuine garbage. There's enough left behind that I fill my daughter's wagon each time.
We also live near a large outdoor bar. It's usually fine, but opening weekend is a mob scene. Oddly enough, by noon on the day after opening, our town is the cleanest it ever is. Scout troops and church groups come out to clean up the trash on the morning after opening day. Boy scouts shouldn't have to do clean up trash as a service project. They should be building benches in cemeteries and clearing overgrown hiking trails. Yet they spend the morning after Tiki Bar opening day picking up beer cans, plastic cups, fast food wrappers, and everything else the bar patrons have discarded on their way to and from the bar. (There's not much parking near the bar, so people park all over our small town, as far as two miles away, to walk to the bar. It's fantastic people watching)
My four year old sweetie didn't take long to catch on to the fact that littering is just plain lazy. "Mama, ders witterbugs all ova did town! Wook at all da twash evewywhewe!" Translation and side note: "Mama, there's litterbugs all over this town! Look at all the trash everywhere!" Just OBTW, it makes me a little twitchy when people post things on social media, written as their kids pronounce it, but I feel like it really does contribute to the context here. Reading it out loud, in that little kid voice, with the little kid pronunciations, makes the littering seem that much more ridiculous. Sweet little girl. She makes signs and gives them to her little friends, to discourage litterbugs and their habits.
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| No littering, yo! Especially not blueberry seltzer water cans! |
Cans are the litter that Short Drawers and I pick up most often. A volunteer from my godson's private K-8 school takes the cans to a local distributor for cash. The money earned from recycling is used for the eighth grade field trip. The school is less than a half mile from our house, with an easily accessible drop-off point for the cans, so we take the collected cans, along with our own stash of seltzer water, ginger beer, and Coke Zero cans, to the school when our five gallon "can bucket" gets full. My godson's younger brother is in sixth grade. That school's only getting cans through his eighth grade year. After that, I'm cashing them in for LEG's college savings account. She'll be able to afford an Ivy League education with no student loans at this rate. (And I'm totally sure my special snowflake will get into Yale. I say that in jest. I have no idea. I just chuckle a bit at all the parents of toddlers and preschoolers who are certain their little prodigies are gifted.) We collected 11 cans in the 0.8 miles between our house and the library one day. That was just three days after I'd done a solo can run over the weekend. Oy vey!
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| 0.8 miles |
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| Two miles, a different day. Dang, litterbugs drink some nasty beer! |
Tell me about your worst litter experiences. Mine was in my teens, when I was lifeguarding at the pool at a marina. There was a big overnight sailboat race that ended at the marina, with the winners coming in sometime before dawn on Saturday morning. After disinfecting the pool, I spent a good portion of Monday picking up cigarette butts from the gravel parking lot. Ewww.
