I mow an 800' long section of ditch that is attached to my property and adjacent to a 4 lane highway. I pick up an average of 1/4 of a garbage bag every 5 days when I am mowing peak season. There aren't as many Fireball 100 and 300 ml plastic bottles as there are beer and soda cans, but there are surprising a lot of these specific containers, must be popular stuff.
There are definitely soda bottles and, of course, no plastic beer bottles, but the beer cans seem to outnumber the soda cans. I think that may be because people discard the beer cans as evidence more than the soda cans. Not sure. But, I'd bet I pull 2 to 3 redeemable cans and a bottle or two every 5 days of various varieties of soda and beer. (When my wife and I walk the gravel road that comes off that 4 lane, we pick up 99% beer cans there. Not a ton of other trash there. This IS evidence disposing I'm pretty sure.) Non-redeemable plastic bottles, fast food refuse of all sorts, and other food containers, especially chip sacks and empty cigarette containers are more prevalent and the biggest filler of the bag really is building material waste. It's bulky, so it takes up more room.
The 4 lane goes to the county dump, so a lot of that blows off of people's trucks and trailers when they don't cover them OR they have the flappy tarps not secured. I don't think they mean to litter, but they might be the biggest culprit on my section of road. That is negligence more than actually making the decision to litter.
I do believe though, that many of the things that I find are simply discarded directly from the user out the window of their car. For instance the cigarette containers are usually in pristine condition, just laying there a few feet off the road. It also seems that the well put back together fast food sacks with the wrappers crumpled up and put back in fully intact are another example of the kind of things that are probably thrown out the window. I find it amazing after all the years of advertising and messaging that people still think its OK to litter. Sad statement on our society.
I just can't conceive of consciously throwing anything out my car window and never have. I can't understand why anyone would or ever could. Are there good arguments FOR littering?
OK, I know this discussion has gone from redeeming bottles and cans to littering, so I will steer it back to this. Even if you don't believe in the redemption system, is there a good reason to at least throw your bottles and cans in the trash instead of out the window? OR is that incredibly inconvenient and economically disadvantageous as well?
