You’re eating a bunch of grapes in a forest. You finish all the grapes and are left with the twiggy bit so you drop it on the ground.
I would say no. You’re just adding more wood to what is already a very woody situation.
not littering IMO
No different from tossing an apple core out your car window (which I have done many times) or spitting the seeds out as you go.
In other words, no, it’s not littering.
Food is biodegradable and not litter. Unless it’s twinkies, which might not be biodegradable.
I agree. But the US Coast Guard prohibits throwing any “food waste” overboard within 12 miles of land. Maybe they don’t want apple cores washing up on the beaches. I’m sure 100 % of boaters violate that one from time to time.
It is biodegradable, but it’s not a good idea to encourage wildlife to forage for discarded food on the side of the road. Car-deer encounters are expensive.
I personally wouldn’t call it littering, but it matters what the people who run the park think. If someone with the power to ticket sees you discard something from a distance, and doesn’t see what it is, you might get cited. Around here they are really (thank DOYC) cracking down on people throwing down cigarette butts-- the “No littering” signs have been changed to say specifically “THIS INCLUDES CIGARETTE BUTTS.”
I once stomped out a small fire started by a tossed butt, and for good measure, poured half my water on it, while hiking in a state park on a really hot day, when the posted fire hazard was HIGH. (When you drive in, there’s always a post that says the fire hazard is low, medium, or high.)
Anyway, I wouldn’t be too confident in the ability of someone watching from a distance to tell grape stems from a butt.
If it has seeds in it tossing it could wreck havoc on the local ecosystem. Otherwise if it’s completely biodegradable I wouldn’t call it littering.
Woman arrested for littering - threw lettuce out of car.
Littering laws generally don’t care what you throw out of a car. Littering laws don’t have anything to do with protecting the environment, they’re to stop unsightly trash disposable. So throwing a grape stem away in the woods can’t be littering because it’s the grape stem is not visually distinct. Don’t expect LEOs with nothing better to do than arrest people for throwing away lettuce to understand that.
Filter-tips are highly non-biodegradable, and are a significant litter problem.
Plain old paper is completely biodegradable. So is a wax-coated paper cup. So, I can just toss what’s left of my McMeal out the window when I’m done, right?
When discussing Leave No Trace with my scouts, we used the example of apple cores introducing an “alien” species to an environment (as spamforbrains said). It’s #17 on this page. Frankly we thought of that as an extreme example, but some people are very anal and would call that littering.
Now how about spitting out sunflower seeds along a hiking trail? It’s the same thing: an organic leftover that will decompose. Is that something you’d want to see when you’re out in nature? The considerate thing would be to “pack it out” with you.
The roadside rest areas I’ve seen in Nevada (and maybe some other nearby states?) explicitly say that No Littering means you can’t even pour water into the shrubbery.
Tried that. Clogged me up something fierce. :eek:
I’d say the population density matters. If you are in an urban park that lots of people use, and you drop apple peels and grape stems on the ground, LOTS of other people will enjoy the residue of your meal long before it biodegrades. If you in a rarely-traveled bit of woodland, the odds are excellent that no one will see your organic waste before it is eaten by animals or otherwise incorporated into the landscape.
I sometimes toss apple cores in place where I don’t think anyone will have to see them. (Which includes the mulch pile in my back yard.)
It’s silly to worry about invasive apple trees in the continental US. That ship sailed about 200 years ago. Johhny Appleseed is the most colorful story around the spread of domestic apples across the continent, but lots of other people transported them, on purpose or as a side effect of tossing away apple cores. Apples are now “feral” pretty much everyplace they grow well.
Leave it as it was before you got there. More than that may not exactly fit the definition of littering but it is jerkish. I personally consider it littering.
Curious - were you with someone who did that? Did you decapitate that person afterwards?
Or did you spot a small fire, nobody else around, and spotted the butt in there?
It doesn’t seem like litter until 100 other people are doing the same thing and then it starts to become a problem. If it was me alone eating grapes in the wood though of course I’m just gonna drop it to the ground.
In regards to cigarette butts once when I was in the Army I was being punished with extra duty I had to police call all the cigarette butts around the barracks buildings, I don’t smoke either so it was especially distasteful to me, you wouldn’t believe how many there were, I predict a lot of lung cancer in their futures.
In CA, there are exactly TWO thing which can legally discharged from a moving car:
- Water
- Chicken feathers - a huge number of chickens were raised in Petaluma. Before “Chicken Feathers” was added to the list, imagine a cop who makes his entire monthly quota by tagging the trucks carrying chickens to market (another of those “You’ll never see again” things).
Cigarette butts on a public beach would be my #1 “Nail the Bastard” piece of litter. Those filters last decades and decades. I don’t want proof of your continued idiocy on the sand.
Tagging those would do two good things:
- Up cost of smoking
- Clean up offensive litter (a used condom would out-rank a butt, barely)
Citrus peels biodegrade very slowly, and they don’t burn up well in a campfire either.