If we’re talking about a 1cm long piece of stalk then I’d be pretty relaxed about it. If it’s the whole bunch of grapes, then I’d consider it littering, I think.
You should see the rest areas (and State Parks and just plain side-of-the-roads) in Nevada the week after Burning Man. Biggest bunch of littering assholes I’ve ever seen.
They make a big deal about cleaning up Black Rock, because they know that shit would get shut down if they left it a mess. They just drive down the highway and dump it wherever when nobody’s looking.
Assholes. :mad:
I wouldn’t consider it littering, although the notion that you’re possibly introducing a new species into an environment it doesn’t belong in is something I wouldn’t have thought of. And it makes me consider rethinking my tendency to throw banana peels out the car window on the highway. (I always pictured the next car slipping on one and flailing like a guy in a Three Stooges bit).
One time when I dropped an apple core out the window on a city street, a guy followed me for a couple of blocks and let me have an earful at a stoplight for littering. I apologized to him and told him he was right – he was, I shouldn’t have done that on a city street.
Definitely littering, but minor littering.
If it doesn’t grow in the forest it doesn’t belong in the forest so, littering.
It is littering as you are disposing of something not natively grown from that area. But I would not necessarily say it is wrong to do so (we all know that it is possible to break the law by doing the correct morally right thing).
If the disposal poses a reasonable risk to native species then is it problematic - this I doubt for the OP’s case. The one I am concerned about is does other people have to see it, if so it is problematic, no one wants to see your trash, moral deficiency here. However if it’s well hidden so it can be reasonably expected to break down before others can see it then it is the right thing to do, but still littering.
So far in this thread I count 13 saying “not littering” and 8 saying “is littering”, so let’s say it’s a bit over 60% who feel it’s OK to do.
Let’s imagine a fairly popular hiking trail that get’s 250,000 visitors per year and put 154,700 grape stems or apple cores or orange peels on it. Does it look like littering now?
I often pour the ice from my soda on the ground or parking lot. I put the cup in my trash bag. I don’t consider that littering because the wet spot will dry in a hour or so.
Grape stem looks like a twig on the ground. Not littering.
I wouldn’t throw a apple core or orange peel on the ground. Thats trash.
Did you discard a solid item on/in an area that wasn’t specifically designated as a waste receptacle? If yes, then it’s litter. Why is that so hard to understand?
Thank you for preventing a fire.
Asshole Smokers are the Worst. I only regret that you didn’t have some back-wash left in the bottle to squirt in that fuckers face.
But what if all 300 million people in the United States showed up at that same spot at the same time and dumped their ice on the ground? There would be a flood!
Yes, I am being a bit snarky, but posters keep up with this line of argument. The policy should not be based on “what if everybody did it” but what would be the likely outcome in the absence of regulation.
No. This nonsense about “field stripping” is a major contributor to the notion that cigarette butts don’t count as litter. All you’re doing is spreading the litter out and making it harder for someone else to deal with. Just stop doing that.
A bit of a hijack, but since this post seem to have grown legs, what the hell…
One night, a little after midnight, I was sleeping and smelled burning leaves. Not uncommon as, while I lived in a subdivision, it was in the county and the yards were 1+ acres and there were plenty of trees. My yard had a lot of pine trees. Anyway, when I woke smelling the burning leaves, I rolled over to go back to sleep, thinking “can’t the bozos around here just compost their leaves (as I do) to keep from stinking up the neighborhood every fall?”.
Then it hit me. It’s after midnight. Who would be burning leaves at this time? I got up and looked outside and there was a fire in my yard! It was along the street and working itself up my driveway (I had not raked up the pine needles and leaves in a while), approaching my car!. I threw on a pair of shorts and ran outside, with a bucket. I was barefoot and hurt my feet, catching a big toenail of one foot on the edge of the concrete (it ended up coming off) and stubbed my other foot on a brick border (lots of pain, some blood, and the toes turned black). I was hobbling around for a week or two (it is hard to hobble when it hurts to walk on either foot).
I put the fire out, with two or three buckets of water. I hobbled back to bed wondering what could have caused the fire? The only thing I could think of was some kids (maybe 15-16) that would park on the road some nights, get out of the car, and smoke cigarettes. I had seen them a few times; never saying anything to them. They would just get out, smoke a bit, then get back in. On a previous occasion, I had to go over and extinguish their “butts” (in quotes, since it was really 3/4 of a cigarette), which is why I thought of it as the cause. I figured one of the group didn’t like smoking, but that is what his group did, so he didn’t want to be an outsider. He didn’t smoke, just lit up and held it for a while.
Anyway, the next morning, as I got up to go to work, I looked at the burn area and it the approximate middle, along the road, there was a nearly complete cigarette ash, butt and all, sitting by the road. I suspect I didn’t hit it with water and wash it away because the fire had consumed all the fuel around it by the time I got there with the water.
I never saw the kids, again, but I knew that if I did, I’d have to approach them and explain to them that while smoking is bad, setting the place on fire is worse.
[/hijack] Whether or not it is littering has nothing to do with it being biodegradable (as I mentioned, paper is biodegradable, actually, it degrades much easier than a grape stem does). Dropping the grape stem in the forest, even along a hiking trail, isn’t littering in my mind, but dropping it on the green of a golf course would be. Along the trail, it would not be any different than the existing leaves, twigs, and whatever else you may find on the forest floor. Five minutes after you dropped it (provided you just didn’t put it the middle of the trail), it would very difficult to even find. On the putting green, however, anyone who came behind you would have to look at your refuse and probably think “what kind of jerk drops his trash on the green?”.
I toss cherry pits into the woods behind my house. It’s my property. They won’t ever bother anyone. But it’s not a “specifically designed waste receptacle”, either. The stuff in trash cans ends up somewhere. Why shouldn’t some of the harmless stuff end up in harmless places?
This. The question is whether your waste will bother anyone else or cause any other problems. A grape stem in the woods, unless those are really well-travelled woods, won’t bother anyone and won’t hurt anything. A banana peel is much more likely to be seen by the next hiker – I don’t discard banana peels in the woods. (I do in my mulch pile, though.) And I wouldn’t drop the grape stem on some else’s lawn, or on a parking lot where other people will have to look at it.
Or, even better, they could stick the filthy little things in their pockets and carry them home. It’s acceptable, but not required, that they put them out first.
I think I heard the same thing about Rod Stewart.
You are right. I should have added a caveat about it not being on the dumper’s private property.
As for the rest – the litter being “harmless” – well, that’s a separate question to debate. I have no doubt that some litter is harmless (or at least very nearly so) in some situations. That doesn’t detract, however, from the fact that it is litter. (Stealing $20 from a multi-billionaire is still theft, even if stealing the same amount from a minimum-wage earner would have a much greater negative impact.)
[QUOTE=Turble;19402580Let’s imagine a fairly popular hiking trail that get’s 250,000 visitors per year and put 154,700 grape stems or apple cores or orange peels on it. Does it look like littering now?[/QUOTE]
It looks like you’re wildly overestimating the popularity of fruit.
I guess I feel that theft is wrong in and of itself, but “litter” is only wrong in so much as someone is harmed by it. Looking at your unsightly trash is certainly harm to me, so in general, I oppose litter. But throwing it into the municipal garbage stream has costs on other people, too. Any disposal of waste that imposes less cost on others than it would if you added that waste to the municipal garbage stream strikes me as neutral, not wrong.
So you’re out walking and you find what you believe to be blueberries. You pick a cupful of them and sit down to eat them. They are unbearably sour - maybe not blueberries after all. They are solid (and there is no waste receptacle), and despite being found in nature, they’re not growing in the exact same spot where you sat to eat them. Will you discard them on the ground?
Everyone draws the line somewhere - I’m trying to discover where you draw yours.
I call shenanigans on that one. A cigarette filter is 0.8 cm in diameter and 3.0 cm long, giving it a volume of 1.5 cm3. 10,000 of them would be 15 liters of cigarette filters alone, not even counting the actual tobacco that would remain, probably adding at least a third to the volume. That’s some deer.