Where I live we have a 10 cent tax on plastic bags. They environment is so much cleaner now. I didn’t realize it was a problem until it wasn’t.
I have a policy that if I come across a bag (usually plastic) while traveling, I pick and take it on the way.
Then I randomly fill it with trash that I can’t ignore while enjoying nature.
Unfortunately, usually only 1 bag isn’t enough.
I do this. I didn’t realize more people don’t lol
Lookin at you, smokers who throw their butts out the car window. Put those in your pocket!
I’ve always put rubbish in my pocket and kept it until I can find a bin after seeing a Sesame street segment about it as a young kid.
But when I smoked I did sometimes drop my butts on the ground. Normally I would keep hold of them if I was near a public bin as most of them have ashtrays in the top I could dispose of them in.
Coincidentally I’ve noticed that l, at least locally to me, the council have replaced those bins with ones with no ashtrays which has definitely increased the number of butts on the ground. Wonder if having them is seen as encouraging smoking.
But sometimes if I wasn’t near a public bin I’d drop my cig, stub it out and leave it on the ground. I used to smoke hand rolled cigarettes with no filter, just tobacco and paper. I justified it to myself saying it would biodegrade but it still can’t have been good for the environment.
I kept a 1/4 filled water bottle in my car for butts. The reason I started this is because an old mad shouted at me at the lights.
I accidentally consumed that water once. Shortly afterwards I quit smoking.
My city now mandates by law that we have to put recyclable materials in the recycling bin and compost in the green bin. You can and will get fined if you don’t and they do check, for households at least, because the vast majority of restaurants, offices, hell city-owned public places like parks, transit stations, libraries, etc do not have a green bin and many don’t even have a recycling bin. I’ve directly been told to just throw it in the trash. Biodegradable packaging is useless 99% of the time because there is no compost bin to put it in and they end up in the landfill anyway.
It’s what I like to call environmental theatre and pinning the burden of waste sorting entirely on the individual instead of seeing it as an infrastructure and access problem requiring government action. Not even a lot of action either, just buy some dollar store trash cans and put them in places since you already have a comprehensive city-wide recycling and compost collection program.
