We’ve ceased to be surprised at the amount of trash lying around in our suburban residential neighborhood, and how long our neighbors will allow trash to lie on their property without picking it up. That really befuddles me, as I cannot understand why someone would allow an obvious piece of trash - say a soda can - to lie on their front lawn for a week or more. But maybe they don’t do their own yard maintenance, and never really look at their property.
Every couple of weeks when we are walking out dog we’ll bring a bag and pick up the trash. Have never noticed any other pedestrians doing the same.
When I was a kid, there was a girls’ HS on the next block, and there were often candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and other trash on our front lawn. My dad ingrained in me that ANY TIME I walked up to my house and saw a bit of trash, I should pick it up. I guess that lesson stuck.
My FIL used to own some property in Michigan. Along the road there would be trash folk threw out of their cars, and along the trails there would be the occasional cigarette butt or candy wrapper someone dropped while 4-wheeling. We picked the up whenever we saw them.
How about you? Do you ever pick up trash? DO you figure “someone else” will do it?
I walk around the yard and pick up trash when I get home every day.
There’s often beer cans and plastic soda or water bottles on the sidewalk or the curb, and I’ll grab those from in front of my house or my immediate neighbor, and toss them in my recycling bin. The recycling pickup guys tend to not be super-thorough in emptying the bins so there’s a lot of “misses” when they’re dumping bins into the truck.
And there’s a high school not far and the kids walking to and from the school tend to shed trash as they go, candy wrappers, chip bags, homework, stuff like that. Sometimes if I’m feeling cheeky, I’ll correct their homework and leave it out on the driveway retaining wall.
I live on the shore of a great lake, and we get trash washing up at times. Not nearly so much as back in the 70’s happily, but still. So yes, I do collect it when I see it on my walks on the beach. Beyond that, we’re quite rural with only local traffic using our roads so we don’t see much litter elsewhere.
The last 3 places we’ve lived have been standard, well maintained suburban areas. So trash is not usually a problem for our lots and almost all peoples. But the last place had trailer trash type people next door. I wouldn’t touch anything on their property but if something big blew onto mine I’d put it back.
Before those places we rented next door to a building that included a laundromat. So, stuff wound up in our parking strip. (There was a fence so nothing ended up in the actual yard.) Oh, well.
Some of the stuff in the OP reminds of David Sedaris who, once he moved to England, started obsessively (and I do mean that) walking the roads in his area and picking up trash. A lot of trash.
One theory about keeping things clean is that it makes people less likely to litter. That was not Sedaris’s experience.
I live close to a dog park and a high school, and occasionally I’ll see where students parked and left their fast food trash. When I walk the dog, I’ll pick it up and dispose it. I used to have a border collie that would pull me directly to the trash so she could eat the leftovers.
A few years ago I got a flat tire, and when I was getting a replacement, the garage told me that with all the construction going on in the city they were seeing a ton of them, as screws and nails and other sharp materials were casually falling off of contractors’ trucks more than usual. So these days I pick up nails and screws if I see them, and toss them in the nearest trash can. Drop in the bucket, but if one guy doesn’t need to replace his Goodyears because I took a nail off the crosswalk, I’m cool with that.
Same here, but Puget Sound. There is actually very little trash on our beach though. Not sure why, maybe the tides take it to someone else’s beach. I’d say maybe once a year we see a can or bag on our beach walk.
We’re not really “rural,” but we’re isolated from other houses and traffic. If there is trash along our driveway or at our house, it’s probably ours to start with and I’ll certainly pick it up. We don’t typically walk the adjoining neighborhood, but from driving it I’d say it’s pretty trash free. I rarely notice anything amiss.
I don’t carry a bag because I’m one person with two big dogs, but if there is a single thing I can pick up and carry home with me I will. So about once a week I’m walking down the street with a piece of cardboard or a plastic bag or a pop can.
For several years around Earth Day I go around the neighborhood with a grabber and a bag and do a real cleanup. Mostly stuff that got stuck in ditches. I had the neighbor kids come with me to help but they moved away so it’s not so fun anymore. I didn’t do it this year, there wasn’t much trash anyway.
I think our trash service got better about getting all of the loose recycleables into their truck with the truck arm.
Anything that shows up in our tiny front yard gets picked up (gingerly) and put in the appropriate bin, but there isn’t much and not often.
I do volunteer work that involves me driving around to visit a list of young street trees and doing tree care. This would be a good chance to pick up trash because there is often some of it around, but I am muscling large quantities of green waste instead. Anything I find in the tree basin I usually move into the gutter in the hope that street cleaning will pick it up.
My former house was on an old narrow street behind a mega church, which sat on the main road. Sunday worshipers would use it as a shortcut to avoid the jam of the main road.
Sundays my street and front lawn would receive the blessings of the faithful, in the form of cans and wrappers.
Because of the noisy exhortations, Sundays weren’t for sleeping in, so in good weather I’d drive to a nature trailhead. Lucky I had the habit of parking nose-out in my carport after once needing a jump. Because on one unique Sunday I saw the baby that had been left in the street. I ran out a picked it up (it was covered in greasy dirt wearing an overloaded diaper, but what was I to do?) and saw that there was a two-ish toddler wandering all around the street, and a 4-5 year old boy ambling in his own direction.
The boy only spoke gibberish, leaving me to assume that the mother was a drug addict. No speech development, dirty, and probably dropped off in proximity to the church in the misguided hope they would be adopted. Misguided because the parishioners who took my street floored it going through in large pickups and SUVs.
A couple of cops responded, not especially interested in the situation, and I never heard anything else. The next Sunday the debris returned to normal.
I’m a homeowner in Chicago and I do pick up trash from my yard (adverts, windblown wrappers, fireworks) as well as curbside and alley trash, usually flattened bottles & cans.
But I don’t carry bags on walks or pick up neighbors’ yards or anything.
I known as the garbage guy in my neighborhood. I take a pick up tool and bag on every walk I take. Part of my walk is on a busy arterial with a middle school. I am amazed at the amount of trash I find on that road. It also dismays me to see all the used up vape pens in front of the middle school. I have a shelf in my garage where i keep some of the “goodies” I have found. This includes $131 in cash. $120 of that was in a waterlogged envelope that had been laying on the side of the road for at least a couple days. Put an ad on Craigslist, tell the the amount and what it was in. 41 guesses and none were correct.
I always pick up trash when walking the dog. There’s an abandoned quarry nearby where we go for special hikes, and the people who fish there are terrible slobs. Bait cartons, fishing flies & monofilament, cans, cups and bottles, all kinds of paper debris. I take a trash bag and a grabber and fill it up. It’s kind of entertaining, like an easter egg hunt.
I live in a largish (almost two acre) wooded lot in the back of a 200 home neighborhood, so few people have need to drive by unless they live in these 5 houses or are visiting them, delivering mail of packages, etc.
We have two kinds of issues. We will find cans, occasionally bottles, snack bags etc. on the verge of the lawn. We pick those up when we walk the dog, 3X a day. The frequency of littering has gone way up since package deliveries have increased in frequency in the last 5 years.
We also have people who “party” in the woods behind the house. I assume underage kids. They leave beer or seltzer cans, snack packages and even chicken wing bones and takeout containers. I find those pretty much every time I have occasion to go into the woods. Just a few times a year. Often at multiple sites.
Every time we go kayaking or pontooning I bring a trash bag and fill it. Only about 10% of the bag is stuff we generated, the rest is other peoples’ crap.
Years ago a cop gave me a hard time over all the empty beer bottles and cans in my Jeep. I had just tossed them in from the take out spot when we kayaked. There is no trunk, so he told me technically I was violating the open container law. I pointed out the cans were rusty, the bottles obviously ancient, but he was going to cite me.
Fine. I’d fight it, try to get tv coverage, etc. But the cop backed down and I became more careful in using black garbage bags.
When I lived in suburbia I sure picked up anything on my lawn and many items from my neighbors. I never got to the point of carrying a bag for that purpose; just whatever fits in my hand.
I’m in dense urban now, so less practical. If I’m going into a storefront I’ll often pick up something from the parking lot and deposit it in the trash can near the door.
You didn’t ask, but at anyplace with carts, I’ll try to bring one in from teh parking lot to use, rather than leaving it out there to obstruct a space or roll into someone’s car. I also return my cart to a corral or the storefront when I’m done with it.
All of these things seem like basic ordinary civilized behavior to me. Sadly it seems less than 0.1% of current gen Americans are civilized.
I live just up the street from a middle school and a park, so we get the typical school-child trash - candy wrappers, school papers (never thought of grading them, but now I might start!), energy-drink cans - along with fast-food wrappers and cups. I used to just not notice the smaller trash in my yard because it’s mainly fairly tall native grasses, but since retirement, I’ve planted a few things that need more care and I pick up the trash I see when I’m doing maintenance on it.
I’m pretty good about picking up trash on the sidewalk and street in front of my own house, and if I’m near a trash can, I’ll toss litter into it at the park. I calculate that I’m probably one more year of retirement away from carrying a trash bag, and another year from bringing a grabber along.
