I always bring bags/gloves/grabber with me whenever I visit the local national park. The rubbish is particularly bad in popular picnic spots, like the areas around Audley^1. The NPWS staff do a great job of keeping the parks clean, but they can't get everything. You'd be shocked how quickly you can fill a garbage bag on a short walk. The most common items by far are disposable coffee cups and cigarette packets (with nearly 100% imported packaging). Just make sure you're careful about snakes in summer. I once put my hand within striking distance when picking up a chip packet! Some of them are so well camouflaged.
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.
Littered across this website are countless gems and gotchas to make you think about the consequences of your purchases and actions. In particular the treasures he has found are quite surprising, 100 phones?! Just from looking for trash? The author is 47 I think and he's been doing stuff for 17 years. I have some of my own cool found trash collections too. The trash you find revels the personality of the place.
10 bibles for another example. I have seen bibles a lot of places, but never as trash. He describes his giant ashtray and the tale of the tens of thousands of other pieces of trash he picked up on his way to one million cigarette butts. I love this guy and his website. This is what we gray beards mean when we speak of the Internet of old.
I was surprised by the number of bibles too! I don't think I've ever seen one as litter (not counting those left in hotel rooms), but I've seen other kinds of religious literature like tracts, booklets, and watchtower magazines
That's the kind of thing that people like to hand out to people walking by. Many people, if handed a booklet they didn't actually want to read, will just toss it on the ground.
As someone who has been pressured to take a book by random (mostly religious) people on a college campus, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the person taking it.
If you choose to accept a book because you are too uncomfortable to say the word "no" then you should accept that it is your responsibility to dispose of the book appropriately.
Don't blame other people for your own bad behavior.
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.
> started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new
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.
Seem to me if you're picking up litter possibly including needles/syringes you don't want the sort of complicated sharps containers you see at a medical clinic, where you have to operate some sort of trap door mechanism.
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.
If he was picking butts (heh) every day for 8 hours a day, he’d have to pick a butt every 10 seconds. That seems like an implausible amount of butt picking.
If you watch the video, you'll see he shows a many dozens all in a small area, just within quick pan of the camera. He can probably pick up one per second for several minutes. That, or scoop them up in a huge bunch with a little bit of dirt, and sift them later.
It's not that implausible.
He even says he initially expected it would take a few years to reach one million.
I hope he comes to India and starts a movement, ideally leading to a public holiday tradition where everyone is supposed to pick up 10 pieces of litter.
Perhaps the coolest website I’ve seen this year. The amount of dedication is incredible. If you look at this cynically you will get nowhere, but if you realize something like this can inspire the next Boyan Slat, it’s fantastic.
I thought so, too. I randomly found this on Reddit and it struck a chord with me, especially as an urban dweller that absolutely despises litter and litterers.
I'm starting to suspect I might be cynical.
I was pretty impressed at the "1,000,000 cigarette butts that I removed from the environment" but I couldn't help but think "moved into what?" which brought this (https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM) to mind:
[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…
Also, I couldn't help but wonder if he was removing trash at a faster rate than it was being added. Picking up litter is a good thing certainly, but we really need to get people to stop creating it in the first place. Even properly disposed of all that trash is a massive problem, but I'd love to see more effort getting people to clean up after themselves. A very long time ago I'd see PSAs with owls imploring us to "Give a hoot" and fake indians crying. Was that helpful? Does that kind of thing even exist today? Now that nobody watches TV are they pushed at kids on tiktok?
That Pepsi can is from the days before aluminum cans. And the pull tabs all separated completely. You would see thousands of those pull tabs everywhere you stopped your car, especially where you least wanted to see them, like in National Parks.
I frequently walk 20 minutes from my house to a trailhead. Along the way, I often see annoying trash. Somehow, a freeway underpass (a road going underneath I-90) seems to be catnip to people who want to throw trash out of their cars.
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.
I don't understand why the local governments do such a poor job at cleaning litter. Do they not understand how bad it is? In NYC, the Bronx is utterly filthy.
It'd be an interesting jobs program. Cleaning up neighborhoods can have a lot of beneficial effects like reducing the amount of new litter. It could even reduce crime. It's also a job that would get people outside and keep them moving which is probably better for their health than being chained to desk all day, and it can't be done (even poorly) by a chatbot
NYC's approach (or lack of an approach, depending on how you look at it) has been to unevenly distribute trashcans. This student made an interesting visualization of the distribution[1].
Unsurprisingly, trash can placement correlates with neighborhood wealth. Poorer neighborhoods get fewer city-managed trashcans, so more trash ends up on the street.
Would you though? As somebody else pointed out it could be a good public works/job creation program. You could probably put 4-5 people to work cleaning up a year for less than 1 cop. I’m kind of making up numbers here but I feel like that can’t be too far off what with salary, pension, equipment, etc.
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.
This works best when you pair it with promoting personal responsibility, otherwise you have to be careful it doesn't lead to the mindset of "I can throw this on the ground because it's somebody else's job to pick it up."
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.
Don't blame other people for your own bad behavior.
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.
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.youtube.com/watch?v=UKHLG1iOBUA
https://greenmachines.com/
https://www.harborfreight.com/36-in-pickup-and-reach-tool-61...
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.
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.