I thought this would be a recent batch review…
We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is smoking still very prevalent in San Fransisco? No, but for some reason people think throwing cigarette butts on the ground and out of car windows isn't littering.
They are returning the gifts of the tobacco plant to the Earth
Along with the dino juice for the filter. It's a circle of life.
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#23Treat the symptoms, not the disease. Way to go!
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#24I’d be interested in seeing the correlation with the existence (or not) of trashcans. Huge swathes of commercial/retail areas in SF have no/few trashcans, and I would assume that there’s a limit to how long people will carry trash/empty containers before just dropping them on the ground
Tokyo has almost no public trashcans. And the crowds are significantly larger than SF, and it's significantly cleaner in Tokyo (at least from what I've seen).
You can't really use Japan as a model for any place outside of Japan. You can't make San Francisco's residents behave like Tokyo's any more than you can make Ruth Bader Ginsburg the left tackle for the Dallas Cowboys.
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a little subjective though. 800 Starbucks cups is a much larger issue compared to 1500 cigarette butts (for example)
Is it tho? Coffee cups are made of paper. Cigarette butts are a plastic foam embedded with a multitude of carcinogens.
I don't have a reference, but I believe coffee cups are assumed to be recyclable even though actually, and in most part due to the polyethylene-lined inside, they are not.
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#26A simple form of this was done in Prague recently, to see what tourists were throwing away (5 min video).
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#27I’d be interested in seeing the correlation with the existence (or not) of trashcans. Huge swathes of commercial/retail areas in SF have no/few trashcans, and I would assume that there’s a limit to how long people will carry trash/empty containers before just dropping them on the ground
Tokyo has almost no public trashcans. And the crowds are significantly larger than SF, and it's significantly cleaner in Tokyo (at least from what I've seen).
Absolutely. I think litter is entirely a cultural/social issue.
It might be a little trite but I sometimes think the Eastern approach of Shame is more effective than the Western approach of Guilt in curbing small social transgressions.
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#28"Many of the peaks in this dataset correspond to holidays and/or events that bring more people out onto the street — Halloween, for example, shows up prominently."
yeah I guess so
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#29I’d be interested in seeing the correlation with the existence (or not) of trashcans. Huge swathes of commercial/retail areas in SF have no/few trashcans, and I would assume that there’s a limit to how long people will carry trash/empty containers before just dropping them on the ground
Tokyo has almost no public trashcans. And the crowds are significantly larger than SF, and it's significantly cleaner in Tokyo (at least from what I've seen).
It's more a culture thing in Japan. If you're Japanese, and litter, you will get shamed by passersby so hard that you'll never do it again. People in the US won't do that nearly as often, and people in the US aren't as affected by shame as much as people in Japan.
Re: We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a little subjective though. 800 Starbucks cups is a much larger issue compared to 1500 cigarette butts (for example)
Is it tho? Coffee cups are made of paper. Cigarette butts are a plastic foam embedded with a multitude of carcinogens.
Wrong. Cigarette filters are made from cellulose.