littering

written august 2014

i thought it would be good to write something here.

recently i was sent on a litter-picking activity by the school, with a few other classes. this is not a tirade about how the year 5s chose me as one of their beach cleaning i/cs without fully briefing me about what i should be doing, resulting in screwups and miscommunication

it was a terrible scene. there was rubbish everywhere. my friend frank and i scoured a long stretch of the beach and we filled up an entire trash bag (and before that, we filled up about another half). a memorable part of the cleaning was when we had to pick out bottles, styrofoam boxes and other litter from within a whole bunch of shrubs. these objects were stuck in the shrubs because they were presumably washed up from the high tide. it was very difficult to get them out of the shrubs, despite using both the litter pickers as well as by hand.

i don’t litter. well, that might not be entirely true. i don’t litter, 99% of the time. the few times when i consciously throw things on the ground are when i have a bunch of coupon tabs with me after tearing the parking coupons. occasionally, seeing that there are no trash cans around, i do litter. i’m not proud of it. but recently i haven’t been doing that anymore. i hold on to the coupon tabs and find a trash can and throw it inside.

so i guess what i want to say is that littering is a horrible act. if you do litter, you should stop.