Solution to Trash Left Behind!

No 27 eight by ten color glossy photographs with with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one?

From personal experience, I know one type of crowd that leaves trash behind are those that like to booze it up big time at night and then leave that night or early the next day. I've picked up dozens of bottles and cans left behind as these boozers down on then casually throw it over the shoulder. These are younger kids doing this from what I can tell. They are also the ones that will play their music loud at night while they "party". Rangers should crack down on this behavior with heavy fines. The forest isn't for partying it up. The second type are just the lazy and thoughtless people. Annecdotal evidence suggests there is some cultural element to it as well but not exclusively.

What surprises me is that we as a society have adopted the use of plastic for everything and yet only just recently are we coming up with ways to handle the waste stream. It is with much irony that our "recycling" efforts for the last 30 years have involved collecting what we can then putting it on a ship and dumping it somewhere else. Did we actually recycle anything or are we just making some people feel good about it while ignoring the problem further? Might we have done better just to bury or incinerate it ourselves where we can control the method it is done in? Today there are modern recycling plants that can effectively sort single stream waste plastic efficiently and effectively to make the end product valuable to manufacturers but that is a relatively new development.

In my own perfect world, plastic wouldn't be used for single use applications. IE, anything at a fast food resteraunt should be compositible. Any single use consumer plastic product should be designed to break down within a few weeks of exposure to UV rays or salt water. We can put a man on the moon, (or could at least at one point...) how come we can't design plastic for our potato chips that disintegrates when exposed to sun or salt water?

People dump trash because they are inconsiderate pigs, not because there's not a convenient place for them to dump it.

Its their trash and they're responsible for it. Period.

RV parks put the dumpster as far from the campers as possible so they don't have to smell it.

There are zero excuses to leave trash behind. Zero.

Part of the problem with litter is there is no convenient place to dispose it. People dump tires, old mattresses, etc. along seldom traveled roads and other places because municipal dumping places are few and far as well as their charges for dumping are out of reach for many people. In some campgrounds, the "pack it in-pack it out" plan where you are supposed to take all your trash home with you, leaves people without any resource to discard leaky smelly trash they don't want in the passenger seat of their vehicle. Other campgrounds have one central spot for trash disposal, often quite a distance from the campsite.

There's a lot of people out there that are pigs and don't care.

I pick up as much trash as I can off the trails as I can while out riding.

There's no cure.

Buzzcut1 wrote:
Last year at Lexington Horse Park Campground the folks next to us left garbage all over their campsite packed up their RV and left. I took photos of it and their site reservation tag then bagged up all the trash and went down to the camp office. Showed them the photos, the garbage and the site slip. Rangers mailed out a $100 ticket and blocked the folks from reserving a site anywhere in the Kentucky state parks campground system. Harsh but excellent lesson.

This is a great solution to the problem. We host and we don't see many the leave a site in bad condition. I like the ticket and ban idea.

NRALIFR wrote:
If they know where to send the trash, why don’t they just send them a bill for disposing it?

:):)

Right, send a fine with the trash package. Double if not paid in a month. Triple it if not paid in two months. AND ban from campsites for a year. If it doesn't hurt, people like that don't care and won't learn.

If they know where to send the trash, why don’t they just send them a bill for disposing it?

:):)

jimh425 wrote:
Just wondering why OP didn’t mention the suggestion of the article. Any way, if it was at a reserved camp space, I guess mailing would work but cost money. So, seems pretty dumb of Thailand but maybe they have high enough taxes to pay for it.

This was a publicity stunt. It makes no sense to pay someone to collect the trash and then pay to mail it to them...where all they will do is shrug and then throw it in the trash.

We love Thailand but litter control isn't their strong point...not even close.

It is sign of the times, or changing culture.
I live last street before desert, so lot of young drivers come here for marijuana smoke, lunch or other night activities.
The culture require all lunch trash to be left on the middle of the street (from opening driver door) while all glass bottles have to be smack against the curb.
Only the latex become thing of a past and now face masks are flying around.