If every person picked up a piece of litter a day, the world would be exceptionally cleaner quite quickly.
I make a point to pick up any I see; you can carry dog waste bags if you're scared to touch things.
Back when I first started doing these clean-up projects, I started by just picking up litter that was in my own neighborhood. (Because that was where I lived, and because I had never been to a lot of the other neighborhoods in my area.) But I found that the more that I did this kind of work, the more that I wanted to do it, and I eventually found myself going beyond my own neighborhood and into neighborhoods that I had never been to before. (Including the ones that I had always heard were "bad neighborhoods".)
Then to make things more interesting, I started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new that I had never been to before whenever I picked up litter. And after going through a big stack of monthly bus passes, and walking down just about every street in the city (and doing it alone and without a phone) I want to say that not only has nothing bad ever happened to me, but I've encountered a lot of strangers who were almost "too nice" to me...
Because these clean-up projects involve a lot of walking and lugging around heavy stuff, it seems that no matter where I go, strangers will keep pulling over to offer me a ride. And because I do these projects even during extreme weather, the more intense the weather gets, the nicer people will become. (During the summer on really hot days, strangers will keep pulling over just to ask if I'm going to be OK working outside in the heat and if they can go and buy some cold water for me, and sometimes people will even try to give me an umbrella or an extra coat on days when it's raining or snowing.)
And there were times when I would pick up a penny that was in the middle of road or stuck in a crack in the sidewalk, and I guess that it would give strangers walking by the impression that I must need money, and sometimes people would actually pull out their wallet and start trying to give me money!
Strangers will also come up and thank me for what I'm doing, and sometimes they will end up talking to me for a long time, and I've ended up meeting a lot of friendly people this way.
I have been shown such a good side of people, that it simply wouldn't make sense for me to go back to being fearful of strangers and automatically imagining the worst-case scenarios about them. (Like I tended to do back when I didn't get out much and my view of the outside world was being shaped by watching the News.)
I don't doubt that there is crime in my area. (After all, "littering" itself is a crime, and there are MILLIONS of examples of this crime in plain sight where I live.)
But because I have been doing these clean-up projects, I've spent more time outside and less time looking at a screen in the past few years than I have at any other time in my life. And I know that what I am about to say will probably sound crazy to anyone who did the exact opposite of that and who spent the past few years locked in their homes and being bombarded all day long by the media with stories about crime, riots, racism, sickness, and war, but I honestly have never felt safer going outside than I do today.
I started picking up litter in my neighborhood because I wanted to help make the world a better place, and because it got me to get out more and start to base my view of the outside world on my actual experience in the outside world, the world is a much better place to me now, and that is the priceless treasure that I found while picking up a zillion pieces of litter.
That's a fun thing to do when you move cities, or countries.
I spent several weekends riding every single tram line in Helsinki with my son. We'd pick a number we'd not yet done and ride each both ways to the terminus.
Get out at the end of the line and see what was nearby, have a cake, then come back home.
We had a map from the local transport company and we'd put stickers on the lines we'd done, and the last stops.
A good way to see different neighbourhoods in the same city.
You want something simple, like a bucket, maybe with a funnel type opening, so that you can pick up the syringe with a grab tool and just drop it into the container with a minimum of handling or manuvering required.
Doctors and nurses who are practiced at handling sharps still stick themselves occasionally. You really don't want to touch them with your hands, even with gloved hands.
Seems the FDA agrees they’re suitable: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safely-using-sharps-need...
They’re pretty common in nursing homes in my area.
There are a lot of two liter bottles which are full or half full to be found, normally right near the shore. The first couple of times I found these, I foolishly emptied them (thought this was a good idea since they are so heavy) and along with whatever kind of liquid was inside, AA batteries came out. I vaguely have memories as a child of trying to create "explosives" by putting batteries in a bottle and throwing them (after shaking everything up of course). Not sure if that is what is going on here but if so, kids haven't changed much. I am sure that the kids that put these together later regret it (like around dinner time same day), but couldn't retrieve their device for fear that it might "blow", and so they just have to hope it is deactivated with time.
The item which to me is most baffling which I find in high volumes, is dental flossing sticks. These are commonly found everywhere around the ponds. I don't believe I have ever seen someone using a dental flossing stick in public. I have looked this up and I did find something suggesting that fisherman might use these as an all-purpose tool. Still not sure what this is all about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3gK-X32cy8
He started in 2020 and the video summary was made in 2021.
It's not that implausible.
He even says he initially expected it would take a few years to reach one million.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2014/jul/31/davi...
Why is the glove photo claiming censorship? Are the gloves arranged like letters or something? Am I missing a joke?
The correct answer is XER?APUOBIA LEADS TO INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED CARROTS
I do not know why you did not spot check the number of letters!
vabsbenz 34 minutes ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]
In ASL the white gloves spell out "Germaphobia leads to individually wrapped carrots"
[Interviewer:] Into another environment….
[Senator Collins:] No, no, no. it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment
[Interviewer:] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.
[Senator Collins:] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.
[Interviewer:] Well, what’s out there?
[Senator Collins:] Nothing’s out there…
A clear reminder not to litter mostly just signals to people that other people care, but that works remarkably well.
I belonged to a service org in college that required each member do like 30 hours of community service a semester. Mostly we did stuff like working at food pantries and the like, but if you didn't have time in your schedule, you could go down to the beach and wetlands and pickup trash. Perhaps not as high-impact as feeding the hungry, but it was something. Well, after a few of these trips I realized that a significant fraction of the trash we were picking up was styrofoam food containers, which was weird, since California had drastically cut back on styrofoam by that point (though the total ban only came into effect this year).
Turned out that there were exactly 2 restaurants anywhere near the wetlands that used sytrofoam food containers, so a buddy and I took it upon ourselves to go talk to them. Ideally I would talk them out of using styrofoam, but at the very least it would be good to let them know that they're single-handedly fucking up this nice slice of nature.
One of the places straight-up stopped using styrofoam altogether. Both were perfectly happy to let us hang up a sign basically saying "Hey, we collectively spend 200 hours a year trying to clean up these wetlands, please don't litter".
Food containers from those restaurants all but completely disappeared from the wetlands after that. People tend to do the right thing, but sometimes they just need a little push.
I wonder if people are less likely to litter if they don't see any other litter already on the ground
Wrote about why the door only opens one way: https://philippdubach.com/posts/when-ai-labs-become-defense-...
Eventually I got fed up and picked up a few bags full of trash. Then I found another guy nearby who also likes picking up trash, so we had a few get-togethers where we collect 3 trash bags each. He has a connection with our city sanitation department, so they come and pick up the bags.
The same guy also runs a once-a-month litter pick up event where we meet at the post office and spend an hour picking up trash. He provides hi-viz vests, trash bags, and grabbers. Usually about 10 people show up.
Overall it puts me in a bad mood to see so much trash thrown out by shitty people.
https://www.harborfreight.com/36-in-pickup-and-reach-tool-61...
The Kerala government is pushing for better waste management now with more trash bins placed at public places and a state-wide effort to segregate waste at the source and collect it from homes.
Still people litter with abandon and it's hard to change ingrained habits.
I have no doubt there is a litter problem in India, but take heart. It's not all bad.
EDIT: OMG, this may be my favorite website I've found in a WHILE! https://www.sixstepstobetterhealth.com/wheelbarrow.html
Unsurprisingly, trash can placement correlates with neighborhood wealth. Poorer neighborhoods get fewer city-managed trashcans, so more trash ends up on the street.
[1]: https://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/visualization/waste-...
And in some places like NYC you'd have to rival the police budget to make a dent in it.
A few hundred people dedicated to taking care of litter would likely make a difference anywhere. You can get that for far less than $6 billion. You could pay 1000 people $1000/day to do it and you’d be at $365mill.
Chinese cities are clean and tidy, not because people don't litter - they litter much worse than Americans or Europeans, from what I've seen - but because someone is paid to clean up the litter.
In the US you likely need wildly punitive measures - not just small fines - to deal with the issue. Also would fall along party aligns with minutes and become a partisan issue immediately.
I would be more than happy to see my city or state tax dollars put towards a cleanup initiative. We have a particularly fragile ecosystem
We can all be the change we want to see, even if it's just a minor effort.
Around here major cleanups are done by some of the local "community groups" but they also have a department of parks that does some additional to named trails.
1: https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/things-to-do/cafes-and-...
When my brother and I were young, my parents used to pay us 5 cents for every piece of rubbish we picked up on bushwalks. We got a few dollars to buy the things they would have invariably bought for us anyway, and the walking tracks became, for at least an hour or so, free from garbage.