Okay, on the grand scale of danger, injustice, etc. this is minor rant but it drives me wall-eyed batshit when people casually toss JUNK aside or out of cars.
I’m not so anal that some wind-blown litter totally blows fuses. Hey, sometimes “stuff” gets loose. But people who deliberately toss cans, hambuger sacks, LITTER aside drive me bonkers. Hey, thank you SO much for sharing that.
Example: in the car, followed a female who was weaving around like a Marine on first leave from boot camp. She was weaving because she was excavating the car floor and seats of a few months worth of trash, merrily tossing it out the window. HER car was “clean” (right) but she left a trash trail for blocks. Grrrr.
Maybe it’s obsessive and anal and all those other trendy terms, but I’m digusted at having to live with other people’s carelessly discarded crap. Toss it on your own damned carpet if you want, but we’re sharing this one…
Okay, just venting here. Wish I knew a constructive way to handle it.
I’m with you, Veb. It’s one of my pet peeves. Especially since, at the end of my rural road, there’s a stop sign, which seems to be a time-out for everyone to haul their fast food trash out the window. I’ve never understood it. Why not just wait til you get home, and throw it out there???
I do, at least in this county, get the logic of throwing beer cans out…less evidence.
Pick up the car with a forklift, and take it to the nearest facility that has equipment for crushing cars into coffee-table-sized blocks.
Repeat the process whenever you spot an offender.
When you have collected enough blocks, stack them up into the form of a building (a nice two-room bungalow with a detached garage might look attractive. Failing that, a soup kitchen).
You are neither anal nor obsessive, Veb. It’s a vile habit. These people are self absorbed jerks who think that the world revolves around them so they can do whatever they feel like. It’s not really that hard to put a garbage bag in the car, put all your junk in there, and then toss that in the nearest available garbage can (there are only about a billion garbage cans out there, if you can’t wait to get home). I’m a smoker and I won’t even throw cigarette butts out the window.
We should follow these people home and dump all our garbage on their lawns - see how they like it.
If you were anal/obsessive you’d carry a cheap video camera in your car and tape offenders in the act. Then collect the reward when you turn them in for littering. In CA, I think there’s a $1,000 fine for littering. Might be $1,500. I don’t know how much the reward is.
I remember several years ago someone taped a crewman dumping trash from a cruise ship. I think the reward he got was something like $500,000, but I’m not sure.
I’m now riddled with revenge fantasies. I really liked KDad’s option of turning the offender’s car into a squished slab on metal the size of a coffee table. Don’t have the equipment, but the fantasy is in place.
Thanks to JohnLA: I don’t have a camcorder, but this sounds like sufficient vigilante incentive to buy one. (HOW much was that reward again?)
Ooooh, yes, the pick-up-and-stuff-back-in-car fantasy. I honestly thought about this. It would have been sweet: “Oh, I belive this is your Hardee’s sack, HoHo wrapper, pork rinds bag and low-fat California onion dip carton”. Too bad 1. it would have taken a half hour to pick up the trash and 2. the wench was probably armed.
I’m considering a Litter Slingshot: pick up, load, aim and fire–the micreant is decked with his/her own crumpled McRib box.
All I can add to this is a “Yep, I’m right there with ya.”
And cigarette butts are the worst in my opinion too. The sad fact is that there is so much litter on roadsides that throwing a butt out your windows has a fairly decent chance of catching the trash on fire, if not the bushes and brush there too.
I don’t know what the reward is if you turn someone in for littering. The signs I’ve seen had an amount, but I don’t remember what it was. And it said “for the arrest and conviction”, so the authorities would have to decide it’s worth their while to prosecute.
As for the cruise line, I thought that was a pretty hefty reward (if I remembered the amount correctly). Again, IIRC, the reward was 10% and the cruise line was slapped with a $5 million fine. I don’t know what the penalty is for dumping stuff at sea, but it seems to be pretty large (and it should be).
For a funny/serious take on this very subject read Carl Hiaasen’s new book Sick Puppy. I adore Hiaasen and read everything he writes; this new book centers around the revenge taken on a high mucky-muck trash thrower. Made me laugh right out loud, it did.
And may I suggest a special section in Hell reserved for people who leave empty bottles in parking spaces? Why??? I assume these people have cars, and understand what a PITA it is to change a tire, not to mention the cost.
Worse than this, are the people who leave bottles, both broken and whole, cigarette butts, dirty diapers and other assorted trash in and around playgrounds.
You know how they publish pictures of deadbeat dads or johns in certain papers? I think that they ought to run tv specials showing hidden camera videos of people littering. And not only should they be sure to have lots of nice, focused head shots, they should announce the person’s name and place of business.
