Occasionally, as I am making the trip from my car to church or vice versa, I encounter a person who is walking past the front of the property, who sees a fast-food wrapper or drink cup, picks it up and squirrels it away for proper disposal at some distant trash can.
Of course, I feel slightly guilty, as I should probably be picking up trash from my own church’s lot, instead of total strangers. Nevertheless, I always am pleased to see that people care enough about their surroundings to do this.
I don’t remember seeing anyone do this anywhere else – my church is in Princeton, where folks are a bit different from the rest of Jersey (e.g. they come to a complete stop to allow pedestrians to cross the street), so this might be a factor. To the best of my recollection, every person I have observed doing this has been a forty-something outdoorsey-looking female. Do men do this? Younger folks?
Do you pick up bits of litter when you are out for a stroll?
I sometimes do. If it’s something big and obvious, like a McDonalds paper bag or a chocolate bar wrapper, and it’s close to a trash can, I’ll pick it up and toss it in. Same for bottles and cans.
I don’t touch anything icky, though, and I won’t pick something up and take it with me in hopes of finding a trash can.
As much as I’d like to do my small part as a good citizen to keep the environment clean, I don’t want to be handling someone else’s trash without knowing whose hands touched it and where their hands have been. If it’s something like a piece of paper, maybe I’ll pick it up and throw it away, but fast food litter, cigarette butts, etc., no way.
plastic bags, pieces of newspapers, fastfood cups, aluminum cans… If I’m near a trash can, or heading into a house/office I’ll pick them up. I don’t usually bother with small pieces (cigarette butts, gum wrappers)
Occasionally I’m tempted to pick up that cigarette someone just flung out their car window, hand it back to them saying “I think you dropped this” and walk away. I hate it when people just toss those out of the car.
No, but I have been known to stop while driving and move something out of the road (like a box) so that people won’t have to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid it.
When I look at other people’s garbage, it seems contaminated to me, quite out of proportion to whatever use it might have been put to. Some ganglion tucked away in some primitive corner of my brain declaims insistently that even the most innocent piece of litter must be teeming with germs.
Maybe it all goes back go some childhood trauma. I have some vague memory (mostly suppressed, I think) of picking up a discarded food wrapper or a napkin or something and discovering that I’ve just stuck my finger into a glob of somebody else’s mucus. shudder
Sometimes I can muster the courage to chuck an abandoned can or bottle into the recycling bin, but that’s about it.
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