Why do people feel the need to litter? | Hacker News Reader

Why do people feel the need to litter?

discovermagazine.com

40 pointsjbrins194 comments

They have main character syndrome. I have seen people throw empty wrappers and cans out the window of a car at an intersection.

They’ve no concept of the public good. Life is just a series of hustles for them to scam their way through existence.

> Life is just a series of hustles for them to scam their way through existence.

Well maybe we’ll get to hear from some of them! This sounds like the exact place to find people with that attitude.

Yeah, the amount of mcdonalds trash I've found in a park within 15 feet of a bin is really amazing. They just can't be bothered. The park is there to serve them, and there exist others who take the trash away for their enjoyment.

A non-zero amount of litter comes out of bins due to wind or wildlife!

I used to date someone with a nicotine addiction who threw cigarette butts on the ground, or out of the window if driving. Whilst I strongly disapproved of the behaviour, she did not exhibit any of the other qualities you ascribe to litterbugs. She picked up her dog's shit, for example.

I think it was just a case of it seeming like a tiny amount of litter compared to the hassle of safely and cleanly disposing of a smoldering cigarette.

I agree that littering is antisocial, but if you paint everyone who does it as sociopathic, you prematurely rule out a bunch of measures that might be effective in tackling the problem.

In many parts of the world cigarette butts specifically are not considered "littering" and it's socially acceptable to just throw them on the pavement. Everyone did that when I was growing up.

Cigarette filters contain plastic.

Plus a lot of toxins from the cigarette, their purpose being to filter that out of the smoke.

Yeah, and not to justify or minimize it in any way (just old enough to remember the US before smoking bans started up and contributing a bit of explanation of how people thought back then), but cigarette butts are also a bit less "portable" than a lot of other litter. It's something that was recently on fire; you can't just put it in your pocket to dispose of later like a candy wrapper. You need to stub it out on something first and often the convenient way to do that is to put it on the ground and grind it with your shoe. At that point it's already on the ground and now it's an extra step to pick it back up vs just leave it there. Plus, unless you were extremely careful putting it out, it might be safer to leave it on the pavement or dirt than to toss it into a garbage can where you risk starting a fire if there isn't a dedicated ash tray available. So, yeah, cigarette butts were/are commonly normalized as something slightly different than "litter" for many.

"Disposing of this is too inconvenient" is more or less exactly the same as other litter.

Right, but GP's point is that cigarette butts are uniquely inconvenient in a way that, say, a candy wrapper isn't.

Sure, but that wasn't really my point; people were being branded as semi-psychopathic for littering, and I just wanted to point out that this is hugely influenced by social norms and such.

I mean, smoking is pretty anti-social adjacent. Smells bad, makes the people that do it smell bad, leads people to argue that their litter is special.

Yeah, I don't agree with that at all. Lots of things "smell bad" or are an inconvenience to others. We all have to "suck it up" at times.

> You need to stub it out on something first and often the convenient way to do that is to put it on the ground and grind it with your shoe.

Takes about 3 seconds for me to roll the cigarette with two fingers right there by the cherry and squeeze a little bit and pop it right out. Shoe is way too much work.

As an ex-smoker, I also used to just toss cigarette butts anywhere without thought. Decades after quitting it's still surprising to me that I ever thought this was normal (I've never, otherwise, been a big litterer).

At least when I began smoking in my early teens this was just what smokers did. When you were done smoking you just tossed the butt on the ground and stomped it out. I remember being annoyed when someone scolded me for littering, at the time it somehow felt different but I admitted the logic didn't quite work out.

I suspect a lot of this behavior originated from behaviors established before filtered cigarettes were the norm. Just tobacco rolled in thin paper, especially when burnt to the end before it burns your fingers, will likely break down after the first heavy rain. Filtered butts however, hang around for a long time.

i have serious mental health problems and physical health problems so i can sometimes come off as entitled just because i am in pain. but my solution to the problem of not littering is that i put things in my pockets. one can even have a small dog poop bag and put the stuff into it. but i would reason that orange peels and banana peels are ok to put into bushes. maybe this is controversial, but i do this and if you tell me off about it im gonna become defensive and write you off as porcelain lover. (a person who likes using a toilet rather than shitting from a branch in nature)

i agree on most of your comment.

Do what now?

I used to swim laps regularly. At the lap pool there were various bits of equipment for general use, kickboard/flippers/floats and such. Nobody ever seemed to return them to the racks. They instead massed into a pile at the end of the lanes. So when I was done my routine I regularly pickup them all up, sometime making a thing of how many kickboards I could carry at once. About 50% of the time some other swimmer would say "By pickup those up you are taking a job away from a lifeguard." Entitled pricks. Some people just don't care about the world around them, to the point that they believe their laziness literally supports other people.

>About 50% of the time some other swimmer would say "By pickup those up you are taking a job away from a lifeguard." Entitled pricks.

Didn't they realize Gary Oldman was the villain in Fifth Element?

You'll see a similar attitude with shopping carts, "it's the cart collector's job to get those" as if that somehow kept the carts from blocking parking spots and walkways in the 30-90 minutes it takes that cart collector guy to come out and get them. My typical response is "so do you piss all over the toilet seat and leave it there because it's the janitor's job to come clean it up?"

What about plastic recycling and "don't throw this in the garbage!" items like batteries? My stance on those is that offloading it to the consumer is shitty and ineffective. Either have the garbage collection facility handle that or design products that safely biodegrade. An average person shouldn't be asked to do work to enable irresponsible manufacturing choices or underfunded waste management.

Some councils here will collect batteries left in a bag on top of the rubbish bin, but where I live they need taking to a collection point in a shop 5mins away. Even if we had to take them further I wouldn't think of that as "work".

More should be done to encourage people to use recharagble batteries though, they save so much money on top of all the other benefits.

After I moved to the UK I had a bit of a culture shock moment about this with my girlfriend; she just left the cart out on the parking lot. "wtf are doing?!"; "oh, someone will come and tidy it, everyone leaves it out".

She is a very kind and considerate person.

Given the per-minute parking regs sometimes seen in the UK, this might be a rational approach.

Nah, just free parking at Tesco and Sainsbury's. I can't recall ever paying for parking at stores like that.

This isn't normal, everybody puts them back - especially since the "slot in £1 to unchain" system became normal. Just FYI.

Well this was actually quite a long time ago, and it's really "then-girlfriend" – it's just that "girlfriend" reads better and it doesn't really matter. Didn't have to insert any money (which I specifically recall because it surprised me).

But whether you or I consider it "normal" isn't really important, she considered it "normal", and I can only assume that's because when she grew up everyone was doing it and it was "normal".

They probably do.

...they didn't think it best the lifeguard could concentrate on guarding lives? Astounding.

Well, drowning isn't much of a lifeguard's day. A far bigger threat is slip-and-falls, old people breaking hips and kids breaking arms on wet pool decks. That loose equipment on the ground is a safety hazard, well within their purview to address, preferably by admonishing those responsible for creating the hazard.

In Tokyo, the primary cause of littering is surely that there simply aren't trash cans in public places (allegedly removed after the sarin gas attacks, but IIRC Tokyo metro removed the ones inside the fare gates a year ago to save ~1 million dollars a year)

Drunk people just leave trash in corners or near vending machines instead, if they can't be assed to carry it for the rest of the night until they get home.

Having moved from Hamburg Germany to Shinjuku a few months ago I would like to add that I am still astonished by how clean the streets are here despite there not being trash bins except for the ones for cans and the ones inside of konbinis. Of course some people litter and if you go to Kabukicho or the along the street to Shin Okubo you’ll see more trash than let’s say in Nishi Shinjuku but given the density of these areas it’s still so surprisingly clean here. I also regularly see people (often elderly) pick up trash from the streets and put it into the trash bags just to clean the streets for everyone apparently. Maybe it is just the collectivist society showing here but I think this is rad!

Having just spent a week there, I can confirm there is almost zero public trash cans. I found this really interesting and ended up carrying my trash a good bit, but quickly adapted. I also hardly saw any litter.

I was in Korea several years back, and they had an innovation that anyone with working experience in fast food could appreciate: Built into the garbage cans at places like KFC was a hole to pour the remains of your soda into, so later on some kid didn't have to delicately move a garbage bag with two gallons of liquid in the bottom of it.

We can't have that in the US because it would take about 30 seconds for someone to plug the hole up with garbage.

Every self service soda machine has a drip tray connected to a drain. That’s where you’re supposed to pour the liquid (though clearly most people don’t know).

Please don't do that -- nobody wants to see you pour your backwash into the soda machine drip tray. That might be ok for overflow while pouring it, but not after you're done. Yuck!

Some European cities have solved that by replacing the rubbish bins with rings that hold a transparent rubbish bad so people can see if there is a bomb inside. I wonder why no city in Japan has adopted that approach.

I think there is a perverse logic behind removing trash cans: people who usually don't just throw their trash on the street will carry it with them until they find a way to dispose it properly (at home if they have to); people who are prone to littering will usually do it even if there are trash cans nearby. So I guess the percentage of people who will litter only if they don't find a trashcan is probably small enough so the savings from not having to empty as many trash cans outweigh the cost of cleaning up the additional litter (which has to be done anyway).

The article is based on a 2011 study which drills down deeply into the types of garbage, but not the types of people who litter. Everyone does not litter equally.

If anything I feel the urge of cleaning up, even after other people, not littering.

The beach is one of these places where as I'm leaving I clean my entire area and even leftovers from other people and put them in the trash bin.

I was always told that folks who litter don’t have ownership. It’s not theirs so they’ll mistreat it.

I would be surprised if this was any deeper than people being lazy. Some people aren't so they don't mind holding onto their trash on the way to the trash can. Most people are. Some are guilty about being too lazy to uphold good manners they learnt they should have. Some had lazy parents who didn't teach them any.

I'm very lazy, but I have anxiety about being a bad person. Perhaps it could just be that they don't have the anxiety.

Some do it just in spite. There is also unintentional litter Things that just fell down from pocket - if there is enough people in area - some small % of this litter is guaranteed.

> Some had lazy parents who didn't teach them any.

My kids will occasionally pick up litter to throw it in a bin. It's one thing I did right, at least.

Something I see a lot-- way too often-- is like bags of fast food trash next to my car in a parking lot. I'll come back to my car and there's a big to-go bag of trash.

Kinda refutes your point because it requires action to actually TAKE the trash OUT OF YOUR OWN car and place it on the ground next to someone else's. If they were truly "just lazy" they would just leave trash in the car (we've all seen these folks' cars)

They're cleaning out their car-- they just don't care to actually throw the trash away-- the ground is fine for them.

That's not lazy, that's a choice.

I have wondered if its not a deliberate act at all. It seems more subconscious, learned behavior, like people who randomly steal things, or drive overly aggressive. It's all baked into their psyche.

I agree with this. If you grew up in the ghetto where there's piles of trash everywhere, why are you going to feel bad about throwing a candy wrapper on top of the pile. That's literally the 'grain of sand is not a pile' thought experiment.

One separate thing I want to point out is that not all litter was littered. trash trucks blow it out in the wind, mentally ill homeless people throw it on the ground while scouring the trash bins looking for a 0.05 soda bottle refund (which was, ironically, done to reduce littering). Animals get into trash. So don't knee-jerk when you see trash on the ground and assume it was from a deliberate act.

Yes, in our street in London most litter is from foxes raiding bins. We have food recycle bins which are basically a foxes takeaway despite locking lids. Next most is builders - no, polystyrene won't stay in an open skip.

Some people are just evil.

I have found a broken lead motorbike battery in a watery ditch near the farm of my brother. When you have fields and see the shit people throw on the land - just because its cheaper then garbage-dump. Only socialized garbage dispossal works. Its goto be cheap, instant, everywhere- else..

Biggest pigs are construction companys (painters) and restaurants (had somebody dump a truck-load of old kepab-meat). You have no recourse.

Also highly problematic are plants from gardens. People buy exotic plants, that grow beyond all excpectations, trim them and throw the "compost heap" trash into the forrest. Where it takes root again and things go wild.

Once its reported, the bill to clean that up goes to the landowner.

Also fun - new building material dumps - stryofoam and brick mixed- dumped in the wilderness and if found by officals, the landowner goto dig it all up and disposse it. Its incredibble how fewfarmers murder people.

> Only socialized garbage dispossal works.

Absolutely. In Netherland, there's a general attitude that the polluter has to pay for it, which I generally agree with. The problem is that this means cities will charge money for garbage disposal, sometimes even locking trash containers so they can only be used by residents, but all of that just encourage people to dump their trash somewhere else.

Garbage collection has to be free. It's the only way it's going to work. If you're going to tax it, you need to tax it at the point of production, not the point of disposal. I'm all for a heavy tax on disposable single-use plastic packaging, for example. Encourage alternatives, don't encourage littering.

The vast majority of litter in my area is from the homeless population.

They receive ‘donations’ from well intentioned people, usually in the form of items wrapped in single use plastics. Those wrappers are simply discarded on site. None of them use a dumpster, even if in walking distance.

There are several ‘good’ members of the population who want out, but have mental issues (I speak to and help personally), but the lion share is drug users with no desire except to use, and while angry about their situation, that is less important than to use.

I’m active in trying to provide real help as it’s something I’m passionate about. My advice is please don’t give anyone a single use plastic, please paper wrappers only. Remind them your help is conditional on them throwing the trash away and you’ll be back to check for the wrapper.

Please PLEASE don’t hand homeless cash donations, this hours straight to the local dealers. This drives up policing cost when they become violent or have to perform wellness checks, and they inevitably wind up in the ER for OD or wandering into traffic, driving up healthcare costs since they simply leave and never pay, using it as s convenient in demand shelter. If you do have cash, donate it to your local mission. If the homeless person demands cash, tell them you sent your money there.

I live rurally where the only traffic is a few locals, and then a bunch of suburban people who drive 20-30mins to get out here in groups who haven't adapted to norms around loitering and privacy - or littering. My property abuts a scenic corner that started to attract people over covid. Given it's one group of recent arrivals, objectively there is a cultural factor in attitudes to litter that needs to be a part of integrating newcomers from urbanized societies who aren't familiar with the conservation of nature. It's an education thing, and unless you are from here or somewhere with nature, you don't learn it. Living in opposition to the natural environment is practically the definition of being poor.

After going out and talking to the people about it a lot, I just bought a drone to send out instead and it has been less civil but more effective. The numbers are down this year, and the litter has reduced significantly, as the people who encounter the drone don't return. The solution to litter is education and being forthright in your stewardship of the places you live, and recognizing that asserting norms is a constructive way to help people integrate instead of silently resenting and isolating them.

Oh wow, different kind of rural than I’m used to and that post went the opposites direction from what I was expecting. I’m used to rural folks who scoff at conservation and dump entire trash bags by the side of the road, among other things.

Must be a regional difference. You imply your area’s got nice natural areas and not just farmland, so maybe that’s it.

Poor farmers will dump trash too, successful ones don't. Litter is the effect of many people doing a little of it. Where I live is not "just farmland," but if you leave a gate unlocked, you can get some criminals from the city dumping a truckload of dirty fill in your field, but that's another group who have integrated enough to become that bold.

I have similar experience. I also love in a rural area. I work at a ski resort, and I can't tell you how many times I've seen a fancy car pull into the parking lot, open the door, and Immediately set a whole bag of fast food trash right on the ground next to the car. And along the highway, groups stop to sled in the snow. And when they leave, the pile of busted sleds, used diapers, and food trash looks like a homeless camp. And then the campsites... I don't typically like to make broad judgments about groups of people, but culture is a real thing, and urban folks seem to be the worst offenders by far.

For a while I worked in an office “strip” — we had a pharma company, a CAD company, etc, and also next door to us in the biggest suite a company that provided some sort of CPAP machine services to the general public.

I was fascinated / upset that the two parking spots closest to that place always had trash (which would blow around) — often fast food wrappers. the entrance was perhaps 10 yards from the parking spot and there was a bin in between, so 5 yards away. I’d see people pull up, open the car door, dump their trash out, then exit the car and head for the business.

Obviously there were more people parking there (higher throughput) than in the other spots, where someone would come to work and leave their car all day. But if there is a small n% of litterers in the population it felt (not scientifically) like this group had a higher percentage than the population in general.

This left me wondering since what the psychology is. Unfortunately this article didn’t really get into it despite the title. I grew up the opposite way (pick up litter as you walk around) so I find this weird.

> The researchers noticed that people were more likely to litter if they weren't close to a garbage can. The more trash bins available, the more likely a person would dispose of their trash properly.

100%. I always carried trash to the bin, but easily understand that there are people who will not bother taking trash to the trash bin.

Bins are half of a story, however. I _think_ it also depends on society. I live in post-soviet country. I've grown up in a small city that went from not so nice and litter here and there to clean, flowers around, etc. Well-being enabled much of that. But also people were tamed to it.

In southern Germany, I once stopped by gas station and just took my time to look around. My attention was brought by automatic washing machine were people step out of car and garage style doors don't get closed while washing in progress.

Then on a nearby street, ADAC pulls over a car. Technician had totally clean dress. Then comes the garbage truck. The bins were totally clean. The workers had clean dress. The garbage truck was clean. Their attitude to clean/tidy is on a super high level.

I live in the suburbs, where littering isn't a matter of dropping something on the ground, but literally throwing it out your car window in preference to just leaving it on your own floor until you get home.

And I get my exercise partly through daily walks. At least once a week I take a trash bag with me and clean the entire street from the start to my house, a distance of just about 0.2 miles[1]. In about a week, that 0.2 miles (on both sides) typical gets a shopping bad mostly full. The contents are almost entirely from beverages with a little bit of other stuff mixed in. And of those beverages, a large proportion are alcoholic - beer, hard cider, those little bottles they give you on airplanes. Yes, people are making themselves some kind of vodka cocktail in the car.

So my personal experience is that the people littering overlaps significantly with people with bad drinking habits.

[1] I leave the part beyond my house to anyone else who wants to help.

I wonder what the correlation between people who intentionally litter and people who don't return their shopping cart to the corral in parking lots is. I would imagine they overlap a lot.

I imagine it's the same as garbage cans. If the corral is far away, many won't bother. If the parking lot is already full of carts most do the same yet most won't be the first to leave a cart out.

I think littering probably overlaps with so many other bad behaviours that the punishment should include a lifetime ban on directing a company, being a police officer, practising law, and running for political office.

In NYC at least, I get the impression that people who litter just don't think of this city (or even this country) as their home, and it leads to them being nonchalant about trashing it. They're just here to make their money and then go back to wherever they came from.

I don't think of my "home" country as my "home", and I don't feel that about most places I have lived in, but I don't and haven't littered anywhere. Maybe people who feel that "earth" is their home don't litter?

I don't know.

Actually, I think the default is not to. I can't imagine why anyone would.

Recently in Brooklyn I saw a Little Caesars box littered on the street, so I looked it up. The nearest Little Caesars was 3 miles away. Who is transporting that frankly fast-food-quality pizza that distance in the city?!

I have no data to back this up, but after living in NYC for 20 years, the locals litter much more than tourists/commuters.

It's easy to blame them (non locals) because they're not from here. IMHO it is a combination of culture/values and broken window theory (I know the criticism here).

I find this behavior baffling. It's morally wrong to run over a pedestrian with your car when you are in another country. Why would location matter?

I don't understand littering at all, and I seem to be physically incapable of doing it. I will hold on to litter until I finally encounter a trash can, and I've gotten quite adept at tossing trash in the bin from my moving bike. Having trash in your hand and just letting go, knowing it will end up on the ground instead of in a trash can, is a completely alien idea to me (though I'm not always diligent in cleaning up when wind blows my trash in the wrong direction).

> The authors concluded that cleaning and maintaining a trash-free space is a prevention strategy to stop future people from littering. Making trash cans readily available will also reduce litter.

Thank you, Dr. Obvious. More and better positioned trash cans are obviously needed.

If you know you aren't diligent then you obviously are physically capable of it (because you've stated that you observed yourself doing it).

I included it because I recently tried throwing a supermarket receipt in a trash can outside the store. It was a trash can with some sort of roof over it and openings in the side. My hand with the receipt was inside the trash can, underneath the roof. Can't get more inside the trash can without touching trash. I let go, and a gust of wind blew it out of the trash can.

That sort of thing hurts. I feel deeply betrayed by the wind thwarting my attempt to properly dispose of that receipt, and that diminishes my sense of responsibility to go after that receipt and still throw it away properly. (Although I think in this particular case I still did.)

One time years ago, I was scrambling up a steep hill on a hike, holding a gatorade bottle. The climb got more and more treacherous, up crumbly volcanic rocks. Eventually I was climbing with my hands, and then got to a point where I really needed both hands, for my own safety. It took a major mental effort to chuck that bottle, and I still feel guilt about it to this day, many years later.

As an American, in my experience Americans just don’t care. We’re so “ruggedly individualistic” that there’s very little sense of a common good.

In Europe I’ve noticed things are oftentimes cleaner. Even the parts of Canada I’ve been in have been nice. When every American city is covered in trash it’s hard to not to make some sort of generalization.

Of course I’ve been to other places too that have had just as much trash laying around as here.

As dumb as it is, we need more easily accessible trash cans everywhere. You can’t make negligent and lazy people care. But you can make it easier for them to do the right thing. I don’t have a source but I heard Disney World has trash cans placed every X feet after a similar litter study.

https://kab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Litter-Study-Summ...

> Significant progress has been made reducing litter on U.S. roadways in the past decade. The Study estimates litter on America’s roads was down 54 percent since 2009. That decrease of roadway litter builds on the 2009 National Visible Litter Survey that estimated that visible litter had been reduced 61 percent between 1969 and 2009.

Where is the data that shows that it's a non-decreasing problem? Or that the problem isn't being dealt with quickly enough?

And if it needs immediate attention, why not talk about the kinds of remedy? Woodsy Owl had a huge PR effect and greatly raised awareness when I was a kid. That plus a healthy dose of in-their-face shaming stopped a bunch of littering.

For context, Woodsy Owl poster from back in the day:

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_529340

And some background plus an image of what I consider Woodsy in skinny jeans:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb51937...

I find littering almost physically painful and I seriously thank Captain Planet for that.

This trail by my house is next to a restaurant. Everyday Hispanic immigrants who work there and elsewhere go off into the woods by the trail to drink modelo and corona, leaving literally hundreds of boxes, thousands of bottles, and the distinct plastic bags from the mini mart they go to because they don’t check id’s they don’t have. It trickles down into the stream and I’m sure elsewhere.

The property manager did a massive cleanup recently, but I have no doubt it will continue.

I honestly think they don’t understand the detrimental effect littering has. It’s like they live in the 50s and think trash is just clutter that sits and magically goes away.

I’m fairly certain they’re illegal because as said it’s always black bags from that mini mart and I’ve yet to see a bottle of liquor which would come from the gov regulated store. Liquor being the smarter option if you’re going to drink covertly.

I was so pissed about it I reported them to ICE. I'm 95% certain they won't do shit. If you’re going to sneak into this country, don’t turn it into a shit hole.

I suspect the venn diagram of littering and people who do not wash their hands after using the toilet is a circle.

my biases may be showing

It wouldn't be so bad if people were taught during their childhood how to not pee on their hands in the process.

This is nothing compared to Guyana. Trash is stacked up on the outer edge of the ocean. Beautiful sea view. https://www.google.com/search?q=guyana+seawall+litter&source...

Are there just multiple public trampolines at the beach there?

Side note: in Tokyo, one of the cleanest cities on earth, there are (typically?) no public trash cans on the streets; they exist in parks and in convenience stores.

My favorite saying from my dad: "It's clean not where people clean up, but where people don't litter".

Is the title accurate? Does anybody actually like to litter, as in if there was a garbage can right in front of them, they'd rather turn and throw it on the ground?

I assumed that they feel it's acceptable to litter, as in they're not motivated to find a trash can rather than being motivated to litter.

The article mentions "chronic litterers" but doesn't go into any detail.

I’m torn on litter. On one hand, I like a clean immediate environment as much as anybody else. On the other hand, throwing it in the trash is just hiding the problem. The garbage was still generated, and it still goes somewhere. If we were forced to confront the sheer amount of garbage we produce, maybe we would be compelled to produce less. But ah well… out of sight, out of mind.

Uh... no. There'd just be garbage everywhere. (Source: I've lived in places where there was garbage everywhere.)

>maybe we would be compelled to produce less

Dunno, have you met people? Once the place is covered in trash, the next piece of trash has a marginal impact, so "we" wouldn't feel compelled at all. Just drop it wherever.

This...human beings are incredibly resilient.

10000 years ago, litter often contained seeds that could sprout into new plants. Perhaps this habit could be a vestige of those times?

Or we need to put seeds in single-use paper and plastic.

Or we need to eliminate single-use plastics.

  > People were also more likely to litter if they were in an area that already had trash on the ground. A person at a highway rest stop cluttered with cigarette butts and food wrappers was more apt to litter than someone at a manicured park.

I wonder if this controls for the other confounding factors that will affect rates?

Here's a related phenomenon. What's up with people who bag up their dog poop, and then just leave the bag? Especially out in the woods? I see it constantly. They went to the trouble to bring the bags and bag up the poop, and actually made the situation worse. Bagged up it can't naturally decompose, and they've added the bag as a piece of litter.

This claim requires more data. It could be that there's a natural accident rate, where bags end up dropped without intent. With enough dog owners in the area, it would be difficult to distinguish the two.

What matters then is whether they regret, and will seek to improve, their accident rate. Even harder to figure that out without a focused study.

Well I haven't systematically recorded the instances and cross referenced it against the prevalence of dog presence, obviously. Nor do I feel the need to. It's ubiquitous and absolutely not accidental, at least in most cases. The only two possible explanations I can think of are that a) people are under the impression that forests have janitorial staff that will collect the bags or b) they believe that the bags will somehow keep the environment "cleaner" by containing the germs?

One of the leashes I use has a hook to hang bags by the knot. They occasionally fall off.

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