My wife gets mad at me sometimes because I put my cigarette butts in my pockets until I can find a garbage all the time and end up smelling like cigarettes
I visited Japan like 15 years ago, your not alone over there. Everyone does that and has little boxes to store them in. This goes for all trash they make, they don’t have trash cans in public since someone abused them once to bomb a train area. I loved it over there… so much care and respect for everything.
Just in case you don’t know about them, consider switching to a dry herb vaporizer. The smoke is much cleaner and doesn’t smell nearly as bad. Also no butts to deal with.
I usually will call out loudly to someone throwing trash on the floor and let them know they dropped something. With the exception of one dude, everyone immediately picks it up out of embarrassment and throws it away. The one dude, in reference, looked at it and said, “That’s not mine”, to which I said I saw him throw it and pointed to the nearest trash can and said he needed to pick it up and throw it there, he eventually did and we both moved on with our lives, otherwise I would have been forced to use the “Your mommy isn’t here to clean up after you” card.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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