We picked up, tracked, and analyzed 130k pieces of litter in SF
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Background: My friends, Elena and Felipe, and I have been picking up litter 3x per week on Polk Street for year now. We logged all the litter we picked up to see what we can find. After a year picking up we decided to see what we can learn from the data and we wrote an article with the results.
We used the https://www.rubbish.love, which I helped program, to track all the items.
Is it just a standard grabber but with a cellphone holder and some kind of bluetooth trigger embedded in the "grabbing handle" that triggers the phone to take a picture?
More trash cans would be great, but they absolutely won't fix the problem when people regularly empty their contents onto the street.
In Disneyland, there was more litter until they put trashcans everywhere.
"Waste Please"
https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=Waste+Please+Dis...
Living in SF is like living inside a garbage dump combined with a sewer. It’s insane.
Probably burning man should just include end-of-event trash disposal in the ticket price, and have an official collection area people can dump their trash. (Probably some reluctance on BM part to do this 'cuz of the somewhat-inaccurate "radical self-reliance" principle.)
On the streets of NYC, I don't really notice the cigarettes, but I do notice the enormous amount of plastic bags (much of it stuck in trees), plastic or paper cups, straws, takeout containers. And gum. If you ever look at a sidewalk and see dark splotches [1], that's discarded chewing gum. It's absolutely everywhere. Not as invasive, of course, just odd.
I don't know what SF is like, but NYC has a fascinatingly ugly system [2] where you're supposed to put trash and recycling out on the sidewalk for it to be collected, where it's effectively temporary litter. NYC's sanitation workers are notoriously careless about handling the trash, and my pet theory is that a sizable portion of street litter actually originates in the sanitation workers spilling trash on pickup day.
NYC's trash problem is also exacerbated by the fact that landlords can get away with not doing their part in keeping the outside of the building litter-free.
[1] https://www.ediblegeography.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/S...
NYC would stink just as bad if it didn't rain all summer. Maybe worse because of the higher population density.
And any meat processing facilities within a five mile radius will quickly make you pay attention to wind direction forecasts.
DSNY, aka Sanitation, does not pick up trash from commercial businesses, only residencies. Businesses have to hire a private carter. Private carters are notorious for not giving two fucks. They have also been responsible for many pedestrian accidents as well.
I have never really noticed a surge in trash in the streets after DSNY comes by. Though, after schools opened, my house is around the corner from a public school and I see an immediate surge of snack wrappers tossed on my lawn. Same with the building I own near another school, wrapper trash all over.
Anecdotes dont mean much
No, but for some reason people think throwing cigarette butts on the ground and out of car windows isn't littering.
(Also I live in NYC these days, but I used to live in SF).
You may say "yuck". But trust me, good tobacco the second time around is better than the stuff in those nasty папироса.
I agree however, that I'd rather just use re-usable glass or metal cup (with a handle or suitable insulated wrappping) and avoid the potential for hot liquids leaching things out of plastic!
Cigarette butts without the filter are easily degraded organic (carbon) compounds. You can compost them and will get perfectly acceptable potting soil.
Same story for the various additives. As a rule, anything that has a physiological effect and isn't a heavy metal is biodegradable.
However, a used cigarette butt will additionally contain adhesives and any flavorings as well as some leftover compounds deposited by the smoke. The wikipedia article goes into higher detail on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_filter
Cellulose acetate is only sort-of biodegradable like Cellulose. Here is a study looking at the topic: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10924-010-0258-...
> Cellulose is readily biodegraded by organisms that utilize cellulase enzymes, but due to the additional acetyl groups cellulose acetate requires the presence of esterases for the first step in biodegradation. Once partial deacetylation has been accomplished either by enzymes, or by partial chemical hydrolysis, the polymer’s cellulose backbone is readily biodegraded.
I.e. if you throw butts in an ordinary compost pile, they might not get anywhere for a while.
I blame the lack of a real winter. In the northeast people quit smoking when it was banned indoors, because they didn't want to smoke in the freezing cold snow, whereas in SF people just go outside all year around.
I never chuck my butts on the ground, if there isn't a rubbish bin nearby, I'll either put the butt back in my packet, or just put it in my pocket. When I see friends tossing their butts I always have a go at them for littering, most just don't even realise what they're doing is wrong.
I suspect (as an exsmoker) that it's more about the availability of cigarette receptacles. most smokers I know are willing to dispose of butts when there's a convenient place to put them, but are not willing to carry them around until they find a suitable place. used cigarettes make your clothes smell a lot worse that merely smoking outside.
A study commissioned by SF Public Works in 2009 determined that the direct costs for cigarette related litter in San Francisco could be remediated with a 22 cent per pack tax. The actual tax in San Francisco is 85 cents per pack known as the "Cigarette Litter Abatement Fee". The 2009 study claimed around 30 million packs/year are sold in San Francisco which would be roughly 25 million dollars a year in taxes collected for this purpose with an estimated cleanup cost of only 7-8 million. So not only are cigarette smokers already paying for the cleanup they are paying nearly four times the actual cleanup cost for their litter.
The 2009 study: https://sfpublicworks.org/sites/default/files/tobacco_litter...
The tax: https://sftreasurer.org/cigarette
Some kind of data needs to be collected by a team like this team an based on that data the offending brands get bills.
Besides that I think littering could benefit from heavy fines, the same way speeding tickets helped with traffic safety.
Basically a near little free environment should be our aim, I do not see why cannot make this happen.
And at the end of all that, if a company still produces products that we know will probably end as packaging litter... hell yeah, charge them (and implicitly the littering consumers) for that negative externality.
Why not directly punish the person who committed the crime?
If a company produces a product, and then someone uses that product to commit a crime, did the company enable the criminal?
Do you apply this reasoning to any other crimes?
It's unfortunately not realistic to do for every kind of wrapper. Although maybe a weight-based rough measurement might work: I. e. a cents/gram of packaging, and your recycling is spot-checked for contamination. It seems slightly too convoluted, invasive, and draconian even for me, a German green. But might be a possible application of AI ("estimate the number of product wrappings in this heap").
Monday, 4/22, was Earth Day, after Good Friday, Passover, Easter, and of course 4/20 - so a near-perfect storm for SF.
It's not uncommon to see less well-off people walk around town, putting a little bit of rubbish into any bin they pass. It's risky, because fines for dumping household waste in public bins are steep.
Disposing of household waste is quite expensive here, only waste in "official" bin bags is collected, and they're over 1eur/ piece. It's a contributing factor to poverty, and, in my opinion, to fly tipping. After all, why pay for expensive bin bags when you can just chuck your litter anywhere with impunity?
I don't think this has anything to do with terrorism, though. There is a culture of take your trash home with you. Even at work I was not allowed to use the trash bin for anything except work trash. Trash from my lunch, etc, I had to take home.
That's why people don't litter here. For a test, I once left my change in the drink machine by the school -- a drink machine used by all the students. The change was still there 2 weeks later! I think the only reason it eventually was removed was because the company that restocked the machines took it. Probably only because they realised that it was an inconvenience for everyone having to sort out their correct change.
You just can't tell a city of millions of people to act like that ;-). It's a completely different culture and a completely different set of values.
I really wonder if those societal traits are necessarily linked, i. e. by being opposite ends of a spectrum of selfishness. It would seem entirely practical not to litter and also not expect people to mindlessly follow orders (in life and at work) based on the completely arbitrary hierarchy of age (/ gender).
One of the things I've come to realise is that one person's dystopia is another's utopia. I've often felt that living in Japan is a bit like living in a real life "Leave it to Beaver" or "Andy Griffith's show" (especially out in the countryside where I live). I see Japan slowly getting more and more Westernised and it fills me with dread. I lived for nearly 40 years in a society that I really disliked and when I moved to Japan, to my surprise, it was like coming home to a home I had never known. It's 12 years later and I am just getting more and more Japanese.
Japanese people, in general, also like Japanese culture. If you ask a Japanese person why they don't litter, I will lay pretty good odds that the answer will be, "Because I am Japanese". That's really the only answer. You're very unlikely to get an in depth answer about it being good for the environment, or a socially responsible thing to do. People really enjoy this identity. It's one of the reasons that there are relatively few Japanese people who live for long periods abroad.
I guess the thing is that most people are happy in Japan, in the same way that most people are happy in other first world countries. Some people are very unhappy, of course, but I can't really point to a country where that isn't the case. Some things are screwed up, but most things work very well -- just like any other first world country. I should point out that I've lived in Canada, the US and the UK for long periods of time as well, so I've got a pretty good basis for comparison.
Could there be a middle ground between how Japan works and how countries like Canada and the US work? Maybe, but I think you would have a lot of struggles to find the balance to make it work. You would also almost certainly lose very, very good things on both sides and I'm not sure that you would find very, very good things to replace them with.
Running back or receiver? Yeah maybe.
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.
And, yes, it's an extremely strong mechanism. Most emotions are basically evolutionary implementations of government: shame -> criminal law, pity -> social safety net, etc.
Shaming is getting a bad rep these days, but it's essentially the least invasive method a society has to enforce common standards of decency.
I really like that approach to quantitate where the hotspots are and to deliver bins accordingly.
I keep a pack of gum in my car at all times just in case I have a drink socializing somewhere. Having alcoholic beverages on your breath when you get pulled over for something unrelated can make the experience far more annoying, unnecessarily.
yeah I guess so