Poll: litter

[Ron Wenrich]

Poll expires 4-24-06  Are we getting better or worse?

[Brad_S.]

While certainly a good deal of litter can be attributed to "litter bugs", I'm finding the majority of litter around me comes from the wind blowing garbage cans over and blowing containers (mostly milk) out of those shallow recycle boxes. Unintentional litter, but litter still.

[Ed_K]

 Out where we live, people drive back roads and leave their cans behind. Sometimes you can get $5. on an afternoon walk  ;D.

[Jeff]

I said a lot better, but that is in relation to what we had before deposit laws, and the adopt a highway, adopt a road and adopt a forest programs. The Michigan Adopt a Forest Program is directed by our good friend Ada (forum member Stamp).  I'll have to post a note off to her on this because she will have a great insite in how we are doing in Michigan compared to whatever my perception may be.

www.cleanforests.org (one of the websites I designed and mantain, and proudl to do so.)

[thecfarm]

I live on a dead end road and do not put up with any litter.I stop and pick up whatever I don't like.Down on the so called main road,I only clean that up a couple times a year for about a half mile in both directions.Some people seem to think the county turn around is the dump.Tires,fridges,wooden pallets,TVs,and more junk keeps showing up.It's a shame.

[etat]

Its a LOT better around here than it was years ago.  Fines for littering or dumping trash........along with the 'county boys' working the roads and paying off fines in their orange jumpsuits with a police escort folowing their every move every day has helped a LOT!!!! 

[Tom]

We don't see the heavy dumping like we used to.  Once folks would  dump truck fulls of household garbage, trash or commercial storage room stuff in the woods.  Many of us would take excursions on the weekend to go through it and look for something we could use.   That is mostly gone now.

On the other hand, roadside litter has picked up exponentually.  Why, I dont know.  I think a lot has to do with the move of the Urbanites to the freedom of the woods.  They are used to just dropping their McDonald and Burger King cups, bags and boxes anywhere and somebody will pick them up.  Now they are throwing them out on the side of the road and the only ones with enough time to clean these miles is the county road crews. 

We have adopt-a-mile also, and it helps.  These folks don't have the man power to clean up after the jerks with the gum wrappers, styrofoam cups and cigarette packs though.

[isawlogs]

  I was going to say better ... but its spring and the snow is melting and you can see that a lot things have fallen out of car windows over winter , bottles , cans ,  fast food wrappers . 
I just cant get myself to trough any thing out the window ... My pick-up is a mess but I do get around to cleaning it once in a while  ;D
 

[Furby]

A couple weeks back a fellow not far from here was out on a walk along the road and saw some bags of garbage along the road.
Thought he'd see if there were any pop cans.
Ended up finding a body.

[CHARLIE]

Both Minnesota and Wisconsin have always seemed a lot cleaner from litter than the Southern states.  I don't know if it's the "Adopt a higway" program or if most people are more conscience about throwing litter out their car windows.  Still, when the snow melts there is trash in the median and in the ditches to be picked up.  Once it is, it seems to stay pretty clean.

Donna and I took a train trip to Washington D.C.   On our way through Pennsylvania, I saw many places where people dumped appliances over steep dropoffs out of sight from the highway but in view from the railroad.  It really looked pretty bad and there were many places with a lot of old appliances scattered down the slope. I know this happens in every state but I just happened to notice the ones in Pennsylvania because I was awake when traveling through.

[pigman]

Both Minnesota and Wisconsin have always seemed a lot cleaner from litter than the Southern states.  

That is because it is so cold most of the year in those states that no one wants to lower their windows in their vehicles to throw the trash out. ;D

[CHARLIE]

Not so Pigman.  Quite a bit of trash accumulated over the winter and it shows up when the snow melts.  I don't know if it's coming from truck drivers passing through or what, but it's there.

[Jodi]

The litter here got pretty bad after the McDonalds was put in.  :-\

[Jeff]

But Charlie, ours gets cleaned up as soon as the snow is gone, at least here in Michigan it does.  Actually, and this is certainly not a dig at another state, but an observation I made to Tom when I was in Florida. I could not help but think how littered the road sides were on our route to his saw job. There were areas where it looked like every 2 or 3 feet for a mile had debri on it of some sort. I really think our deposit law has a great deal to do with it, followed by the stiff littering fines and then the clean up programs in place add to a different mind set for most, or at least many Michigan Drivers, at least in the northern counties where I live, about throwing trash out the windows.

[LeeB]

I said about the samebut am really starting to reconsidor. Texas used to have the " Don't mess with Texas campain" and it was one of the most effectifve anti litter campaons around. Since it was dropped litter has increased on the road sides and highways. I would like to see us adopt a bottle and can return program here. LeeB

[iain]

I've ticked a lot better

which it is in the city, it's pretty nice

but out in the sticks its way more bad with fly tipping

started to get worse when they tightened up the rules for the city dump and made it a lot more recyclable but also a lot harder to do

but i think mostly people dont mind messing up some one Else's back yard



iain

[SwampDonkey]

Litter here is quite a bit worse than a few years ago. It's not so much the roadside/ditch trash. That's about the same. What the concern is you have folks in rural areas and maybe in town, bringing their washing machines, dryers, fridges, freezers, old tires, junk they collected over the years in their back yard and dumping it on people's private woodlots.  : We have no local dumps anymore and only 1 day out of a year when they pick up large items. There are a couple of scrap yards that take stuff, but people still prefer to dump their rubbage on your woodlot when the ulternative is to take it 25 + miles away.  I think some beleive they are charged a levey at these places, and I've never been charged any levey locally. But, I do understand there 'may be' levies at salvage yards near cities.

[Dana]

I said abou the same as well. I took into account the bottle deposit law and the adopt-a- highway program. Both of these have reduced the litter greatly. Our kids love to pick up the cans on the back roads near the farm (each can has a .10 deposit and it adds up when you are a 6 or 8 year old).The fine is stiffer for drinking than littering so there are usually a few beer cans on the road. Very few pop cans.

[Cedarman]

I think littering could be lowered tremendously if our elected officials really wanted to get it under control. 3 things (there may be more) would make a difference.
1)  Start a strong elementary program to educate the young that littering is bad.  (It has helped bring smoking down and why are their so many "environmentalists"?

2) Enact a bottle tax and a packaging tax.

3) Install cameras along high litter zones to record the license of the perp and then hall them into court and publish their names in the paper.

We still have the bottles and wrappers, but no longer do people dump loads of trash.  Our county seriously enforces the dumping ordinace. If a name is found in the trash the authorities are notified and action taken.

[Tom]

I've given this some thought and my gut feeling is that there are just a lot of selfish, unfeeling and uncaring jerks in this world.  Something that may be able to be changed but not as long as society wears roller skates on a greasy slope.

Where our local governments get their 3rd grade level management ideas is beyond me.  It might work for a teacher to lock everybody up if one person acts up, but it still isn't right.

Here's some examples.  You have to assume the position that there really are tax paying citizens and revenue isn't generated from Government "blue light" sales days.

The elected officials will spend all kinds of money to acquire land for a dump. Spend all kinds of money to man it.  Fine itself for mismanagement. (?)  ....then....   Put a weigh scales at the front door and pay someone to collect fees from those who are dumping their own trash.  It doesn't take many brain cells to realize that charging to dispose of something that a person has no use for anymore will find it on the side of the road.  At  $30 a ton, that fellow just made $30.   Thirty dollars that he can use to pay the taxes next year on the running of the dump, although he probably doesn't think of that.

Even police departments would rather hide an officer in the woods to "catch" someone doing something that would generate revenue than park the Cruiser on the side of the road, in full view, to stop an infraction before it happens.

Deposits are OK, I guess.  It is a real hassle for store owners to keep track of the junk that they have to accept for the state.  I wonder how much of the deposit goes into other funds as another tax at the expense of who.

Somewhere we've lost track of the purpose of taxes.  It seems that too many think that Government is a business.  It isn't.   I'll bet that those who pay deposits on bottles also pay taxes on road clean-up.  Those who walk in State and Federal forests who pay $5.00 a day for the privilege, also pay income taxes and property taxes that support the parks.  Having to pay for places that we already own is mystifying.

I despise trash on the road.  It's ugly.  It's a result of the selfishness of those who live in squalor and the  idiocy of those who think of themselves as "blue blood" who are "above" having to wipe their own after parts.  Neither of these segments of the population are intimidated by fines, deposits or taxes......only work.  Put the son of a guns to work cleaning up the side of the road instead of a free meal in the county jail and they'll think twice before they throw that fast-food container or empty cigarette pack out of the window.  Make'em carry water buckets to workers on a forest fire and they'll think twice before they throw their lit  cigarette butt out of the window and start another fire too.

If our only answer to society's problems is to levy more taxes and fines, then it's  high time that a Government Bureaucracy be created to dispose of those Taxes and Fines that aren't working.  Seems right to me.

[SwampDonkey]

I mentioned the littering on private woodlots, but it also happens on crownlands. It happens quite frequently during the hunting season where Joe Blow takes a pickup load of junk out to the woods with him and drives down and abandoned forest harvest road and deposits his trash over the side of a hill or right on the road if it's over grown. Some people do/did it for spite against the authorities that closed the dumps. We have a $0.10 deposit on bottles and containers and only a $0.05 return, I know the majority won't return those bottles because it costs more in gas to take them to the redemption centre when it's not on their route to work. We do have community recycling centres for paper and plastics, but they don't take the deposit items. Some folks will give them to the kids during their bottle drives. We started out with having to sort the trash but that didn't last 3 months, don't know the problem, because I think if it wasn't sorted they left it by the curb. It may have been too overwhelming for the guys picking it up and trying to keep it separate on the load. Who knows. I don't see those garbage truck guys till about 5 or 6 in the evening. I think they have a long route or maybe they take several loads per day up to the landfill which is about 80 miles from here. Sometimes there is a guy coming along in a panel truck as well as another guy with a garbage truck. I bet she's a long day.

[Tom]

The sorting has met with a disgruntled population here because of the attitude of the people who run the trucks.   So  many things are not allowed that it becomes an effort in futility to satisfy the rules and most are not willing to spend the time.

The trail of the trucks can be followed quite easily by the litter trail they leave. Things they find in the little basket that they deem don't belong are thrown angrily aside and will litter a goodly portion of a persons property.  The Citizenry, deciding that they don't work for the government, has found it much less work to just throw everything in the garbage.  I'm sure the recycle truck drivers are OK with it because they can just drive by 90% of their route.

I've said it before.  Governments and their bureaucracies develop a mindset that the people are here for their benefit.  These programs will never work when administered heavy-handedly with threats of incarceration or other punitive actions.

[Ron Scott]

The "meth lab" litter is getting to be more and more of a problem and concern on forest lands.

[SwampDonkey]

Last friday I found someones fenced in area on a woodlot, where someone was growing thier crop one past summer. I always find them fenced in with chicken wire. Do the rabbits and deer eat that stuff?

The pharmacies here have to put the cold meds with meth derivatives behind the counter now.

[CHARLIE]

I've got to start thinking before reacting or I might get shot or stabbed someday.  It's not just trashy people that litter but people who just plain don't care and are thoughtless enough that they probably don't consider that what they throw down, someone else has to pick up.

Once, Donna and I followed an elderly couple out of a restaurant. They got into their car and the woman, rolled down her window and tossed out a gum wrapper.  I hurridly went over, picked it up and handed it back to her and said, "I think you accidently dropped this on the ground."  She was speechless.  Another time I was walking behind a man that was probably in his late twenties. He took his last swig of a Mountain Dew and dropped the can in the parking lot.  I stooped down, picked it up and caught up to him. I handed him the can and said, "Excuse me sir, you dropped this back there and I'm sure you meant to put it in that trash can over there."  The thing about that was, he was going into a store that had a trashcan by the door, yet he chose to litter.  Another time I was getting gasoline at a convenience store when I saw a car load of High School age girls parked in front of the building. One came out of the store with a carton of cigarettes and they were all laughing and talking loud. I was headed for the store to pay for the gas when the girl riding shotgun rolled down her window and threw an empty cigarette pack onto the ground.  I walked over, picked it up and said to her, "I see you accidently dropped this empty cigarette pack on the ground. I'll put it in the trashcan for you."   They all went silent and I heard one say, "He's really putting it in the trashcan!"  I do hope I embarrassed that girl enough that she'll think the next time.