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Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

sixstepstobetterhealth.com

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#31
post #6

Be sure to check the second page: https://www.sixstepstobetterhealth.com/money.html If every person picked up a piece of litter a day, the world would be exceptionally cleaner quite quickly. I make a point to pick up any I see; you can carry dog waste bags if you're scared to touch things.

This excerpt is well worth reading IMO Back when I first started doing these clean-up projects, I started by just picking up litter that was in my own neighborhood. (Because that was where I lived, and because I had never been to a lot of the other neighborhoods in my area.) But I found that the more that I did this kind of work, the more that I wanted to do it, and I eventually found myself going beyond my own neigh…

> started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new

That's a fun thing to do when you move cities, or countries.

I spent several weekends riding every single tram line in Helsinki with my son. We'd pick a number we'd not yet done and ride each both ways to the terminus.

Get out at the end of the line and see what was nearby, have a cake, then come back home.

We had a map from the local transport company and we'd put stickers on the lines we'd done, and the last stops.

A good way to see different neighbourhoods in the same city.

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#32
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the kind of thing that people like to hand out to people walking by. Many people, if handed a booklet they didn't actually want to read, will just toss it on the ground.

Those people are the worst. If you don't want something, don't take it . Don't make it everyone else's problem by littering.

As someone who has been pressured to take a book by random (mostly religious) people on a college campus, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the person taking it.

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#33
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cost center that people don't want to fund. And in some places like NYC you'd have to rival the police budget to make a dent in it.

Would you though? As somebody else pointed out it could be a good public works/job creation program. You could probably put 4-5 people to work cleaning up a year for less than 1 cop. I’m kind of making up numbers here but I feel like that can’t be too far off what with salary, pension, equipment, etc. A few hundred people dedicated to taking care of litter would likely make a difference anywhere. You can get that for…

This works best when you pair it with promoting personal responsibility, otherwise you have to be careful it doesn't lead to the mindset of "I can throw this on the ground because it's somebody else's job to pick it up."

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#34
That Pepsi can is from the days before aluminum cans. And the pull tabs all separated completely. You would see thousands of those pull tabs everywhere you stopped your car, especially where you least wanted to see them, like in National Parks.

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#35
post #3

I'm starting to suspect I might be cynical. I was pretty impressed at the "1,000,000 cigarette butts that I removed from the environment" but I couldn't help but think "moved into what?" which brought this ( https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM ) to mind: [Interviewer:] Into another environment…. [Senator Collins:] No, no, no. it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment [Interviewer:] Yeah, but from o…

Re the environment thing, practical engineering has a good video on landfills. There's a bunch of engineering that goes into making waste less harmful https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/9/3/the-hidden-engin...

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people are the worst. If you don't want something, don't take it . Don't make it everyone else's problem by littering.

As someone who has been pressured to take a book by random (mostly religious) people on a college campus, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the person taking it.

If you choose to accept a book because you are too uncomfortable to say the word "no" then you should accept that it is your responsibility to dispose of the book appropriately.

Don't blame other people for your own bad behavior.

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#39
post #37

It only took him under one year to pick up the ONE MILLION cigarette butts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3gK-X32cy8 He started in 2020 and the video summary was made in 2021.

If he was picking butts (heh) every day for 8 hours a day, he’d have to pick a butt every 10 seconds. That seems like an implausible amount of butt picking.

Re: Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

#40
post #37

It only took him under one year to pick up the ONE MILLION cigarette butts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3gK-X32cy8 He started in 2020 and the video summary was made in 2021.

If he was picking butts (heh) every day for 8 hours a day, he’d have to pick a butt every 10 seconds. That seems like an implausible amount of butt picking.

Assumimg you pick them one by one. If you found a popular smoke spot I bet you could sweep up hundreds within minutes.
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