If you look on social media or keep up with community newsletters these days, you’ll notice the number of cleanup events held throughout the year. Then there’s Sharkey d’Shark whose entire existence is centered around picking up trash in order to prevent its reaching the local waterways. The folks at Upcycled host regular cleanups, too.
This has been on my mind lately. Whoever is putting that trash out there is really doing a bang-up job. It isn’t any kind of organized initiative but it is wildly successful. It must take a lot of work to generate enough trash and make sure it is located in public areas in order to keep all these local groups hopping, year after year.
A rather odd way of looking at it, I know.
My childhood was filled with the exhortations to “Keep America Beautiful” and “Don’t Be a Litterbug”. Why didn’t that work? This article from Mother Jones is quite educational.
“The Origins of Anti-Litter Campaigns”, Bradford Plumer, Mother Jones
I’ve never known anyone who was objectively pro-litter. Litter’s awful. It’s disgusting. We’re all agreed. But it seems that the nationwide anti-litter campaign, which began in the 1950s, was a bit less pure in its origins. According to Heather Rogers’ Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, the entire anti-litter movement was initiated by a consortium of industry groups who wanted to divert the nation’s attention away from even more radical legislation to control the amount of waste these companies were putting out. It’s a good story worth retelling.
Yikes. I didn’t know that.
Yet it’s clear that the amount and variety of trash being picked up by community cleanups could not solely be the result of a careless toss of a candy wrapper or soda can. It’s a far larger problem than that and cannot be completely conquered by good-hearted individuals taking up (metaphorical) arms against litterbugs. This is not to say that their work isn’t helping or that is isn’t meaningful. It absolutely is.
But let’s be honest. We are just making a dent in it. We aren’t addressing the systemic decisions that make this happen. To be blunt:
there’s just too much **** stuff that people don’t want anymore because they have replaced it with new **** stuff.
We are not talking candy wrappers and soda cans here. We’re also talking old mattresses, tires, broken furniture, plastic household items that were made to become quickly obsolete…you get the picture.
This is not the post I thought I was going to write. I was inspired by a reel on Instagram about Swedish trash cans that say “Mmm! Yum, yum, yum!” when you put in your litter. (I take a dim view of the ones that talk sexy to you in a woman’s voice, however.) Shaping public behavior with fun trash cans is certainly worth a try but it won’t change the bigger picture. Unless…
When you realize that Sweden has enacted strict regulations on packaging, you realize that the anthropomorphic trash bins are only a piece of a larger strategy.
Screen capture from a basic Google search, informed by AI.*
By and large, the U.S. lacks that larger strategy.
It’s rather mindboggling. As hard as members of our community are working to clean up trash, someone(s) are doing a way better job putting it there. Can this cycle be broken?
*Sorry. I was in a hurry.
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