Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter | Hacker News Reader

Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

sixstepstobetterhealth.com

208 pointscolinbartlett75 comments

I always bring bags/gloves/grabber with me whenever I visit the local national park. The rubbish is particularly bad in popular picnic spots, like the areas around Audley^1. The NPWS staff do a great job of keeping the parks clean, but they can't get everything. You'd be shocked how quickly you can fill a garbage bag on a short walk. The most common items by far are disposable coffee cups and cigarette packets (with nearly 100% imported packaging). Just make sure you're careful about snakes in summer. I once put my hand within striking distance when picking up a chip packet! Some of them are so well camouflaged.

1: https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/things-to-do/cafes-and-...

Thanks mate, glad I'm not alone doing this.

When my brother and I were young, my parents used to pay us 5 cents for every piece of rubbish we picked up on bushwalks. We got a few dollars to buy the things they would have invariably bought for us anyway, and the walking tracks became, for at least an hour or so, free from garbage.

I do this with my son when we go for a walk through our nearby reserve! I'm trying to teach him about nature and keeping our environment clean and how we live alongside nature and we should take care of it. He's pretty invested now which is great - when we forget to bring a bag he always mentions it, or if we're walking somewhere else like on the way to kinder he'll point out some rubbish and say we should have brought a bag with us.

Audley and the Sutherland Shire was pristine growing up in the 80s. What's changed?

Audley isn't actually that bad. I just had it in my mind because I visited there recently. You'll still find bits of rubbish around the place, but the NPWS do a great job keeping it clean. Unfortunately any nature area that gets a lot of people will just inevitably get a lot of rubbish.

I spent an enjoyable afternoon on Kailua beach snorkeling for garbage. I found a fishing pole, a complete snorkeling set, and bunches of other stuff. I just grabbed what I found, took it back to the beach, and dumped it in the garbage can. Very satisfying day.

Littered across this website are countless gems and gotchas to make you think about the consequences of your purchases and actions. In particular the treasures he has found are quite surprising, 100 phones?! Just from looking for trash? The author is 47 I think and he's been doing stuff for 17 years. I have some of my own cool found trash collections too. The trash you find revels the personality of the place.

10 bibles for another example. I have seen bibles a lot of places, but never as trash. He describes his giant ashtray and the tale of the tens of thousands of other pieces of trash he picked up on his way to one million cigarette butts. I love this guy and his website. This is what we gray beards mean when we speak of the Internet of old.

I was surprised by the number of bibles too! I don't think I've ever seen one as litter (not counting those left in hotel rooms), but I've seen other kinds of religious literature like tracts, booklets, and watchtower magazines

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.

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.

Best thing, if you accepted the book but realize within a few steps (maybe immediately) that you didn't actually want it, would be to walk back to the person handing it out and say "Changed my mind, don't actually want it, why don't you give it to someone else?" I know some people who hand out religious tracts or other such materials, and every one of them that I know personally would accept the item back with good grace. They'd rather give it to someone who will actually read it.

And if they're the kind of person who won't take it back with good grace? Place it on the ground right next to them, and walk away. Make it their responsibility to deal with it. (If you don't want to go out of your way to find a trash can: some public spaces make them easy to find, but others not so much).

I didn’t say that I chose to accept the book and then threw it away. I said that I said no and the other person proceeded to drag out the interaction in a way that made everyone there uncomfortable.

> 100 phones?! Just from looking for trash?

One scenario: Someone sets phone on top of car and drives off.

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.

What’s the safe way to handle heroin needles?

Have a sharps disposal container, wear gloves, avoid the pointy bit, sanitise regularly.

Seem to me if you're picking up litter possibly including needles/syringes you don't want the sort of complicated sharps containers you see at a medical clinic, where you have to operate some sort of trap door mechanism.

You want something simple, like a bucket, maybe with a funnel type opening, so that you can pick up the syringe with a grab tool and just drop it into the container with a minimum of handling or manuvering required.

Doctors and nurses who are practiced at handling sharps still stick themselves occasionally. You really don't want to touch them with your hands, even with gloved hands.

Our local municipal waste authority recommends using laundry detergent liquid bottles as sharps containers.

Seems the FDA agrees they’re suitable: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safely-using-sharps-need...

You mean something like this? https://store.stericycle.com/8-2-quart-bd-sharps-container/3...

They’re pretty common in nursing homes in my area.

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 neighborhood and into neighborhoods that I had never been to before. (Including the ones that I had always heard were "bad neighborhoods".)

Then to make things more interesting, I started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new that I had never been to before whenever I picked up litter. And after going through a big stack of monthly bus passes, and walking down just about every street in the city (and doing it alone and without a phone) I want to say that not only has nothing bad ever happened to me, but I've encountered a lot of strangers who were almost "too nice" to me...

Because these clean-up projects involve a lot of walking and lugging around heavy stuff, it seems that no matter where I go, strangers will keep pulling over to offer me a ride. And because I do these projects even during extreme weather, the more intense the weather gets, the nicer people will become. (During the summer on really hot days, strangers will keep pulling over just to ask if I'm going to be OK working outside in the heat and if they can go and buy some cold water for me, and sometimes people will even try to give me an umbrella or an extra coat on days when it's raining or snowing.)

And there were times when I would pick up a penny that was in the middle of road or stuck in a crack in the sidewalk, and I guess that it would give strangers walking by the impression that I must need money, and sometimes people would actually pull out their wallet and start trying to give me money!

Strangers will also come up and thank me for what I'm doing, and sometimes they will end up talking to me for a long time, and I've ended up meeting a lot of friendly people this way.

I have been shown such a good side of people, that it simply wouldn't make sense for me to go back to being fearful of strangers and automatically imagining the worst-case scenarios about them. (Like I tended to do back when I didn't get out much and my view of the outside world was being shaped by watching the News.)

I don't doubt that there is crime in my area. (After all, "littering" itself is a crime, and there are MILLIONS of examples of this crime in plain sight where I live.)

But because I have been doing these clean-up projects, I've spent more time outside and less time looking at a screen in the past few years than I have at any other time in my life. And I know that what I am about to say will probably sound crazy to anyone who did the exact opposite of that and who spent the past few years locked in their homes and being bombarded all day long by the media with stories about crime, riots, racism, sickness, and war, but I honestly have never felt safer going outside than I do today.

I started picking up litter in my neighborhood because I wanted to help make the world a better place, and because it got me to get out more and start to base my view of the outside world on my actual experience in the outside world, the world is a much better place to me now, and that is the priceless treasure that I found while picking up a zillion pieces of litter.

> 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.

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.

If you watch the video, you'll see he shows a many dozens all in a small area, just within quick pan of the camera. He can probably pick up one per second for several minutes. That, or scoop them up in a huge bunch with a little bit of dirt, and sift them later.

It's not that implausible.

He even says he initially expected it would take a few years to reach one million.

Perhaps the coolest website I’ve seen this year. The amount of dedication is incredible. If you look at this cynically you will get nowhere, but if you realize something like this can inspire the next Boyan Slat, it’s fantastic.

I thought so, too. I randomly found this on Reddit and it struck a chord with me, especially as an urban dweller that absolutely despises litter and litterers.

I purchased some "grabbers" and often go near the ponds in my neighborhood to pickup litter.

There are a lot of two liter bottles which are full or half full to be found, normally right near the shore. The first couple of times I found these, I foolishly emptied them (thought this was a good idea since they are so heavy) and along with whatever kind of liquid was inside, AA batteries came out. I vaguely have memories as a child of trying to create "explosives" by putting batteries in a bottle and throwing them (after shaking everything up of course). Not sure if that is what is going on here but if so, kids haven't changed much. I am sure that the kids that put these together later regret it (like around dinner time same day), but couldn't retrieve their device for fear that it might "blow", and so they just have to hope it is deactivated with time.

The item which to me is most baffling which I find in high volumes, is dental flossing sticks. These are commonly found everywhere around the ponds. I don't believe I have ever seen someone using a dental flossing stick in public. I have looked this up and I did find something suggesting that fisherman might use these as an all-purpose tool. Still not sure what this is all about.

The Homeless in my area of town use them and drop them on the street.

David Sedaris has a similar hobby:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2014/jul/31/davi...

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 one environment to another environment.

   [Senator Collins:] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.

   [Interviewer:] Well, what’s out there?

   [Senator Collins:] Nothing’s out there…

Also, I couldn't help but wonder if he was removing trash at a faster rate than it was being added. Picking up litter is a good thing certainly, but we really need to get people to stop creating it in the first place. Even properly disposed of all that trash is a massive problem, but I'd love to see more effort getting people to clean up after themselves. A very long time ago I'd see PSAs with owls imploring us to "Give a hoot" and fake indians crying. Was that helpful? Does that kind of thing even exist today? Now that nobody watches TV are they pushed at kids on tiktok?

It looks like he might keep them in his own local environment for photo documentary / artistic purposes.

He's got to have a decent bit of land to keep it all which makes it all the more impressive that he found all that trash in his city.

Classified multi-year contracts and government-funded compute are hard to walk away from when you're burning cash at that rate. Defense economics always do this to companies. Same thing that consolidated the primes in the 90s.

Wrote about why the door only opens one way: https://philippdubach.com/posts/when-ai-labs-become-defense-...

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...

> Also, I couldn't help but wonder if he was removing trash at a faster rate than it was being added.

I wonder if people are less likely to litter if they don't see any other litter already on the ground

I'm fairly certain that it helps. Obviously someone has to start, but when it looks like no one cares others are more likely to contribute to the problem or worse assume that leaving trash there is what's expected of them. The Cart Narc guy has observed a similar trend with shopping carts. If somebody puts one where it doesn't belong it can attract others. You'd think that if people were going to be lazy and leave their carts in the parking lot instead of returning them properly they'd just leave them near their own cars, but some people will go out of their way to put theirs next to other carts even when it's still clearly not where they belong.

Anti littering messaging works remarkably well. Littering's the kind of antisocial activity where the benefit to the individual are marginal, maybe you save a bit of energy holding on to your trash until the next trashcan, but the penalties are almost non-existent, as practically no-one gets cited for littering.

A clear reminder not to litter mostly just signals to people that other people care, but that works remarkably well.

I belonged to a service org in college that required each member do like 30 hours of community service a semester. Mostly we did stuff like working at food pantries and the like, but if you didn't have time in your schedule, you could go down to the beach and wetlands and pickup trash. Perhaps not as high-impact as feeding the hungry, but it was something. Well, after a few of these trips I realized that a significant fraction of the trash we were picking up was styrofoam food containers, which was weird, since California had drastically cut back on styrofoam by that point (though the total ban only came into effect this year).

Turned out that there were exactly 2 restaurants anywhere near the wetlands that used sytrofoam food containers, so a buddy and I took it upon ourselves to go talk to them. Ideally I would talk them out of using styrofoam, but at the very least it would be good to let them know that they're single-handedly fucking up this nice slice of nature.

One of the places straight-up stopped using styrofoam altogether. Both were perfectly happy to let us hang up a sign basically saying "Hey, we collectively spend 200 hours a year trying to clean up these wetlands, please don't litter".

Food containers from those restaurants all but completely disappeared from the wetlands after that. People tend to do the right thing, but sometimes they just need a little push.

I frequently walk 20 minutes from my house to a trailhead. Along the way, I often see annoying trash. Somehow, a freeway underpass (a road going underneath I-90) seems to be catnip to people who want to throw trash out of their cars.

Eventually I got fed up and picked up a few bags full of trash. Then I found another guy nearby who also likes picking up trash, so we had a few get-togethers where we collect 3 trash bags each. He has a connection with our city sanitation department, so they come and pick up the bags.

The same guy also runs a once-a-month litter pick up event where we meet at the post office and spend an hour picking up trash. He provides hi-viz vests, trash bags, and grabbers. Usually about 10 people show up.

Overall it puts me in a bad mood to see so much trash thrown out by shitty people.

https://www.sixstepstobetterhealth.com/covid.html

Why is the glove photo claiming censorship? Are the gloves arranged like letters or something? Am I missing a joke?

I can't explain the censorship claim. The gloves spell out, "stop throwing your gloves on the ground," per Claude.

That seems like it cannot be true? The words are 11, 5, 2, 12, 7, 7 letters long. It cannot be "stop throwing your gloves on the ground".

The correct answer is XER?APUOBIA LEADS TO INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED CARROTS

I do not know why you did not spot check the number of letters!

Another comments that's now dead gives us the most plausible answer:

vabsbenz 34 minutes ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]

In ASL the white gloves spell out "Germaphobia leads to individually wrapped carrots"

Ah, nice. Some of the gloves are very hard to read.

You don't know why?

It was about 7 am when I responded. I thought I was being helpful. I didn't realize the horse dentist was going to inspect my gift. Lol

In what way could injecting noise into a conversation be helpful?

What incredible work. I found his video on all the smoking products he found really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3gK-X32cy8

One of these puppies and some plastic bags to get trash when I take walks.

https://www.harborfreight.com/36-in-pickup-and-reach-tool-61...

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.

Reminds me of this scene in Mad Men:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDIvzDGBLWU

I picked up one of those Pepsi cans doing adopt-a-road once and I was impressed that an artifact from the 70s had remained undisturbed for that long.

I hope he comes to India and starts a movement, ideally leading to a public holiday tradition where everyone is supposed to pick up 10 pieces of litter.

I was super impressed that in Delhi there was no single use plastic. Little tongue depressor things instead of forks. Aluminum foil instead of plastic clam shells. Coming from Vietnam, it was amazing.

I have no doubt there is a litter problem in India, but take heart. It's not all bad.

I don't think one has to wait for someone to start a movement. I pick up plastic bottles whenever I see them and drop them in the nearest trash bin that is meant for plastic bottles. I am in Kerala though, which is comparatively cleaner than the rest of India(except the north-eastern states).

The Kerala government is pushing for better waste management now with more trash bins placed at public places and a state-wide effort to segregate waste at the source and collect it from homes.

Still people litter with abandon and it's hard to change ingrained habits.

At ten seconds each, it would take seventy straight days to collect all those cigarettes... And he had store all this trash just to take a picture.

Exactly. This dude is just the right kind of weird -- doing positive things but also following his offbeat muse just for the hell of it.

EDIT: OMG, this may be my favorite website I've found in a WHILE! https://www.sixstepstobetterhealth.com/wheelbarrow.html

We do this in the summer when we visit the shores of Lake Michigan. The amount of washed up junk we find is shocking.

I don't understand why the local governments do such a poor job at cleaning litter. Do they not understand how bad it is? In NYC, the Bronx is utterly filthy.

It'd be an interesting jobs program. Cleaning up neighborhoods can have a lot of beneficial effects like reducing the amount of new litter. It could even reduce crime. It's also a job that would get people outside and keep them moving which is probably better for their health than being chained to desk all day, and it can't be done (even poorly) by a chatbot

Heck, if the pay is reasonable, count me in!

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 far less than $6 billion. You could pay 1000 people $1000/day to do it and you’d be at $365mill.

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."

People already throw things on the ground because it’s somebody else’s job to pick it up. It’s a culture issue broader than simply “personal responsibility.” People in the US don’t like to be inconvenienced or we tend to shriek about personal freedoms.

In the US you likely need wildly punitive measures - not just small fines - to deal with the issue. Also would fall along party aligns with minutes and become a partisan issue immediately.

Or bring back public shaming - things like https://dontmesswithtexas.org

Yes well-executed public awareness programs can shift culture over several years (this campaign is over 40 years old wow!) but we also need to clean up what's there now and what will continue to accrue until that shift occurs.

I would be more than happy to see my city or state tax dollars put towards a cleanup initiative. We have a particularly fragile ecosystem

Even just seeing people cleaning up is enough to begin to change perceptions, because it turns it from an impersonal action to a personal one - "I'm throwing this wrapper on the ground" vs "I'm throwing this wrapper on the ground for old Joe to pick up."

We can all be the change we want to see, even if it's just a minor effort.

Around here major cleanups are done by some of the local "community groups" but they also have a department of parks that does some additional to named trails.

China does it well. You can't get unemployment benefit, but if you can turn up for work sober every day and are prepared to do menial work, you are guaranteed a job.

Chinese cities are clean and tidy, not because people don't litter - they litter much worse than Americans or Europeans, from what I've seen - but because someone is paid to clean up the litter.

NYC's approach (or lack of an approach, depending on how you look at it) has been to unevenly distribute trashcans. This student made an interesting visualization of the distribution[1].

Unsurprisingly, trash can placement correlates with neighborhood wealth. Poorer neighborhoods get fewer city-managed trashcans, so more trash ends up on the street.

[1]: https://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/visualization/waste-...

I pick up any coin I find. It adds up to a few dollars every year.

Is noone going to comment on the fact that the images are clearly AI generated?

Use the right tool for the job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKHLG1iOBUA

https://greenmachines.com/

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