Earlier today, I was at the gas station, and a woman in a car parked by the entrance emptied out a gift bag, AND THREW THE BAG OUT THE OPEN WINDOW, RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. Yes, I’m shouting! So, I picked it up and tossed it back into the car through that window, and told her, “Use your trash can.”
A few minutes later, I was filling my soda, and she strutted in and told me, “You throw this away yourself! That was very rude!” and I told her, “Littering is too, and it’s illegal.” She then walked out, and to my surprise didn’t flip me the bird, or punch me out, or whatever.
I hate litterers, and in this case, it was a baby shower bag! Great example you are for your kid.
I agree, never understood that. I’ve, multiple times, seen people toss entire bags of garbage (ie mcdonalds bags with the wrappers/sodas in them) out their car window at red lights in busy intersections.
The funny thing is, there’s almost no way they could have scanned all the cars in the area to see if they were doing it in sight of a police car and I always wonder how stupid they’ll feel if they get pulled over for that and end up busted for something else (ie guns/drugs out in plain sight).
The other one that always gets me, and you’ll nearly always see this in parking lots or at stop signs, is one (or several ) soda cans sitting ‘neatly’ on the ground. That is, someone opened their door and set the can on the ground. I think that they think they’re littering ‘less’ since they set it down instead of tossing it out the window. Granted, it’s nice to not have spilled, but it’s still littering. Could they really not wait to get to their destination and toss it in a parking lot.
And, along with all this (because I have a store with a parking lot). People who dump out their drinks in the lot. I really don’t care about water. Dump out all the water bottles you want. It’s the soda and the starbucks and the snapples that drive me up the wall. It leaves the parking lot sticky, it gets tracked into the store so the store floor has to be mopped, it attracts bees and, nearly 100% of the time, it’s right next to their car door, meaning everyone that parks there steps in it until I notice it and go dump a few buckets of water on it.
I had an employee that used to flick her cigarette butts all over the lot. Even being asked multiple times to knock it off and just put them in the garbage she had to walk past to get inside, she continued to do it (don’t bother telling me to fire her, this was like 15 years ago). She also always left her windows cracked all day. Everyday I’d go out into the lot and toss all her cigarette butts back in her car. After a few months of that her boyfriend ‘confronted’ me about it and told me to knock it off. I told him that, ya know, if she stopped leaving them all over the lot and tossed them in the garbage, I wouldn’t be able to do it. To my surprise he said ‘fair enough’. Didn’t stop anything, I was just surprised he didn’t push the subject further.
The funny thing about that one was that her mom used to run a day care that my daughter was at. The few blocks between the main street and her house was noticeably littered with cigarette butts and empty packs of newports.
I HATE littering, it’s part of becoming a grumpy middle aged woman, but I just am increasingly despairing at the utter selfishness of it. And most of the time, it’s people making their OWN NEIGHBOURHOODS look shit. These people will also be the first ones to complain to the council about the area looking a mess and why can’t they clean it up.
Another thing that drives me crazy is all the little doggy poo bags you see hanging off tree branches - you’ve gone to the trouble of actually picking up dog poo, you can’t just carry the bag for ten more minutes til you find a bin?
When you see a smoker holding a lighted cigarette out a car window, flicking out ash, it’s a virtual certainty that the butt will be discarded onto the road eventually.
I find it almost as baffling as I do infuriating. I literally cannot wrap my mind around the mindset of a person who does this. Is it abject laziness? Entitlement? It’s easy to attribute it to either of those things, I guess, but there’s so damned much of it. Can there really be that many . . .socially damaged (?) people in society? Sheer numbers of people who don’t care if their neighborhood looks like a shithole? What possible justification could someone come up with (other than “I don’t give a shit”)?
What really used to drive me nuts when I used to go camping a lot was the trash people would leave along hiking trails and other wilderness areas. WTF is the mindset of someone who travels a long way to see some beautiful wilderness, and then throws their candy wrappers and other trash alongside the trail as they go?
I’ve been to public beaches by gorgeous spring-fed lakes in Michigan’s U.P., and the beach sand was absolutely littered with cigarette butts.
I’ve been hiking in the Smoky Mountains and seen half-burned plastic-foil containers of camping meals left in the fire pit at backpacker camp sites. You’d think of all people, backpackers would be responsible about their garbage, but clearly not all of them. Any campsite I’ve stayed at, I’ve made a point to leave it pristine, cleaner than when I found it. And there’s always a lot of other people’s trash I end up cleaning.
I’m seeing more often now from the intersection panhandlers. They work the intersection medians getting handouts throughout the day and when they’re done just leave a pile of garbage on the median.
I don’t understand why so many smokers think it is fine to toss their butt on the ground. It isn’t as bad as it used to be when you would see butts everywhere, but there are still too many. Smokers: Stop being littering a’holes!
And yes, dog owners, get that poop bag to a trash can.
I think the psychology is more about compartmentalization and lack of empathy. They can’t (or won’t) see themselves or their actions as others see them (that’s the lack of empathy), and when they have garbage to get rid of, they are firmly in the compartment of “gotta get rid of this garbage” to the exclusion of any other considerations like what it does to the environment.
There is also the inability to consider consequences of their actions, so these are some of the same people who get deeply into debt for things they want but don’t need, eat whatever they want whenever they want it, and build houses in fire country and then stare slack-jawed when they have to evacuate because of a forest fire.
I think, for each individual who does this, that it all goes back to whatever they learned as children. My mother lives in the back of my head, making sure that I remember that there are other people in the world besides me, and that my actions have consequences for me and for others. (And I think she would be happy with that legacy.)
And a bit of ‘tragedy of the commons’ - my single candy wrapper is not a big deal, it’s all those other assholes littering that are causing the problem.
I don’t know, but at least it’s gotten better. As a kid (1970s and 1980s) I recall there being drifts of cigarette butts in the gutters and medians of busy streets, along with unspooled cassette tapes. You don’t see the latter at all anymore, and not that many cigarette butts either.
But yeah, occasionally I’ll see someone just fling stuff out of their car window, and it always infuriates me. It’s not like it was on fire or something; you could have just as easily have kept that napkin or drink cup in your car until you got where you were going.
The only place I cut some slack is biodegradable stuff like apple cores. Usually that doesn’t bother me because some critter will make off with it before it’s a problem.
I’m guilty of dumping my drinks out in the lot, because I thought until now that it would simply evaporate in the sun. Now knowing that this is not the case, I will refrain from doing so in the future.
But how do I dispose of them, then? If I tossed a McDonald’s cup that still has some watered-down tea in it, into a trash can, it’d make a mess in the trash bag.
I was once at a gas station filling up when a guy drove up to the adjacent pump and flicked his still burning cigarette butt out onto the ground. I was highly attempted to pick it up and toss it into his back seat with a, “You lost this,” but I chickened out.
Holy shit! Someone, on this very board who doesn’t see dumping trash, on the ground, in the public and other’s private property (parking lots), is littering. Unbelievable.