Solution to Trash Left Behind!

Love the idea of mailing trash back to the folks that generated it! I'd get a kick out of dropping the trash on their doorstep myself!

Those that litter really irritate me, even from a young age. As a teenager (many decades ago), me and my friends would go party in the desert. If a friend decided to chuck trash out the window while I was driving, I'd slam on the brakes and make him or her go pick it up. If they put up any resistance, they would find themselves having a long walk home. Not one bottle or can was ever left behind!

A group I belong to adopted a stretch of freeway and performs clean-up events a couple times a year. The amount of trash picked-up is always shocking.

Problem is, nobody feels like they should be held accountable for their actions these days. Quite sad!

Some people are just pigs. Ask a rental property owner.

Absolutely not making any excuses for those that litter, but half the problems today are that we rarely if ever see garbage cans any more even in Walmart/Big Box Store parking lots. Folks generally as a whole always look for the easiest solution to their problem, so will drop or dump if no recepticals available to dispose of properly within close proximity.

Part and parcel of the problem, well at least in our neighbourhoods is that local city's have started charging through the roof to businesses and homeowners to dispose, and restricting how much garbage they can dispose of per week/bi-weekly. As well recycling fines, if not put in the correct bins, applied through no fault of the business owner when drop bys drop their garbage in cans.

It's all fine and dandy these governing bodies of various levels coming up with ideas to reduce and taxations/fines etc but indirectly they rarely if ever consider the knock on effect of doing so. This has been our experience with many things in life over the past few decades of changes implemented.

It's like all the closures over the years of Rest areas in certain states, many one after the other shut down due to cost of maintaining = surely saving lives from tired driving is priceless?

Kayteg1 wrote:
It is sign of the times, or changing culture.

But then there is the cleanup challenge.

There are a lot of young folks doing very good things.

specta wrote:
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.

Absolutely.

covered wagon wrote:
I found the most beautiful campsite that I go to every year twice a year. recently I've noted toilet paper scattered about. What a tacky thing to see in such a pretty spot along a stream with spawning trout and Kokanee Salmon. I think they should stop all people that do not have an RV with a bathroom and a way to haul it out. Makes me heart broken.

Well that’s a little discriminatory towards those who don’t have RVs but then again, some of y’all on here make up a very eclectic or eccentric crowd.

Instead of mailing trash back to them, just ban the offender and their entire family until they complete X hours of community service?

You'd need a huge beaurocracy to register and enforce something like that ... make everyone register for dispersed camping, and send someone to check the site after their departure.

It is a culture.
Reminds me visit to Spain. That was a generation ago, but doubt it changed.
In Barcelona lot of people go for lunch to bars, who have small front opening, but long bar going to the back and only few tables.
So people eat the lunch and all the napkins go on the floor. At the end of lunch hr you basically have napkins on the floor up to your ankles.
Our friend coming from different culture was leaving his napkin on the plate, what made the waiter angry, becouse he had to drop the napkin on the floor.
Bare in mind that all got cleaned within hr after lunch is over.

adamis wrote:
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?

Yes, my thoughts EXACTLY!
I am disgusted by the various industries perpetuating this "need" for non-biodegradable plastics, our leaders, our generally willfully ignorant populace. We should all be doing so much better, it's 2020 afterall. We need to stop making excuses. Some things just seem like no-brainers to me. I guess others rather trash the planet in the name of $$ or lazyness.

I can walk a 2-3 mile loop around my immediate semi-rural neighboorhood everyday and pick up a bag full of new trash. 99% plastic or styrofoam. It is very sad to me. Don't get me started on the idiots who dump their trash at dispersed sites...

i was eating at a Subway, i saw a woman pull up, park, open door and dump her full ashtray out on the ground. I was finished, so I crumpled up my trash, carried it out to her car, tossed it in her open window. If the world is her trash can, then why can't her car be mine? She saw me do it I hope.

I heard a construction worker, painter, was painting new construction apartments. There was other workers doing some other kind of work. There was no water service in the units yet, but these asian workers would still dump in the toilets where the painter had to paint. He got sick of it and dumpped his urine bottle all over their car seats. They returned the next day with a different car/van and never used the dry toilets again.

Sometimes the good guys win.