Brian Kavanagh April 28, 2013
Have you ever thought about what your community would look like without litter? If so, it may take a while to find out. One person throwing something on the ground may not think much of it, however, when that trash finds other trash, they begin to build up and make big piles of junk. For example, I am sure people never thought that if they littered, their trash would end up in the pacific garbage patch. Believe it or not, no one thinks that until you look at the pacific garbage patch and see how disgusting it looks just because people were to lazy to throw their trash away. To make matters worse, littering has become very common, which should be stopped because in most cases, trash is not disposed of properly,
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Imagine someone tossing a cigarette out of their window. That cigarette gets blown onto someone’s yard and is eaten by their pet. That pet could become seriously sick because of someone else's laziness. According to www.kab.org, over 51 billion pieces of litter land on U.S. roadways each year. That is just roadways. For that cleanup, America spends 11.5 billion dollars each year. 9.1 billion of those dollars are paid by businesses, with the other 2.4 billion being paid between schools, government, and other organizations. Another reason why if all this littering could be disposed of properly, America would have much more money put toward other important …show more content…
For starters, debris can be carried into local waterways effected the water. Also, nearly 7 billions tons of debris end up in the ocean each year. Nearly 100,000 sea mammals are killed by this debris each year. What most people don’t know, is litter can be a serious fire hazard. It kills wild life, and the cleanup money is taken out of taxes. Selfish people who litter in the first place, may not think these effects are harmful because it doesn’t effect them at all, however just think about all the innocent people and animals you are effecting before you litter. Remember, the trash you are about to throw on the ground, could end up in an animals mouth, making them choke to death. Not littering is common sense. If you litter, you are effecting your community, all your friends and families, and making your environment look worse. If you don’t litter, there wouldn’t be billions of dollars spent on litter cleanup, and you wouldn’t have to worry about harming an innocent person or animal.
In order to put an end to all this littering, it needs to start with everyone playing their correct role in society. Although it is not very enforced, littering is illegal. If people would all obey the law, there wouldn’t be an issue. But for those who don’t obey the law, it needs to become stricter. There should be more cops out there on the look out for people littering, and for people who get caught littering, there
we’re wasteful. In order to find solutions for our trash problem, we must first admit that we are
Take a moment to imagine the realization that a young boy came to when two of his favorite movies had a large plotline that was somewhat based on the problems of trash. Wall-E, the famous Pixar movie, was based on a small robot that was left behind on Earth’s surface alone. His job was to clean the garbage that the human population left behind when they went into space to escape their problems. Toy Story 3, another Pixar movie, contained a scene with garbage that was vital to the plot, in which the characters are rescued from a trash furnace that was consuming literally tons of trash a minute. These two movies tried to make the American population aware of the ever growing trash situation, however, Americans quickly forgot about the Earth shattering situation that they are causing. The solution to the world’s trash problem is easy; people need to be educated on the problems of trash and given an easy way to fix it. People should be required to visit a landfill, educated on the severity of the trash problem, and should be rewarded for changing their habits to improve the problem.
In order for environmental change to happen society needs to see the significance of trash. To make sense of that recall a time were you forgot to take the trash out and days later were reminded by the rotten stench? Now multiply the stench of that 1 bag 2 million times. To help you further understand let’s put this in mathematical terms. Let’s say on average 1 garbage bag weighs 20Lbs. that equates to 1bag=20lbs x 2,000,000 = 40 million putrid bags. This equation has opened my eyes. Rogers’s argument that Landfills should be in public places is a good one. Society is sheltered from Landfills: so they are out of sight therefore out of mind. If we can’t see the pollution we can’t change our carbon foot print.
Do cities and other places have to pay to recycle?”Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill”(The Reign of Recycling). Recycling is more expensive but has more benefits than sending garbage to the landfill. Sending garbage to a landfill causes land pollution people need to be educated, have changed attitudes, and motivated to change and solve this problem.
Recycling doesn’t affect people that much, but it does affect wildlife and animals. Like the six pack rings, soda comes in, fish get caught in it and they die. Another thing is plastic bags get thrown into the ocean and turtles mistake it for jellyfish, eat it and die. Would you believe me if I told you that glass, aluminum, paper and plastic are not A report from the Federal Highway Administration shows that 80 percent of the asphalt that is removed each year during widening and resurfacing is reused. Recycling has been around for thousands of years, but we still need to recycle even though people thought of this a long time ago. A consequence is the New York City Landfill. The New york city landfill contains 2.9 billion cubic feet of trash. The new york city landfill can be seen from space. The new york landfill is one of the only things that can be seen from space. Another consequence is that farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota are just now starting to recycle. Minnesota and Wisconsin farms produce 60 million to 80 million pounds of plastic every year, but until now they had no way to get rid of it besides throwing
Did you know that littering could damage the environment. I believe that people should pick up trash and not litter everywhere it could be a fire hazard also it is bad for people's health and it is bad for the environment. littering is a fire hazard. Also it is bad for the environment and it's bad for people's health. people's health cares and if we don't pick up the trash and stop littering we will be endangered and so make sure up stop littering and pick all of it up.
A teacher once told me, “One mans trash is another mans treasure, what he doesn’t appreciate the next man will.” Until recently analyzing this statement I always pondered about it as a metaphor using the thoughts, and ideas of people, but after reading Garbology I have come up with a literal process of reusing trash. On average Americans wastes 220 million tons of waste generated each year in the United States which ends up in one of the over 3,500 landfills. According to Edward Humes, the author of Garbology, “Garbage has become one the most accurate measures of prosperity in the twenty-first-century America and the world,” which proves that trash is a means to improving the success rate of Americans. This reminds me of the words of Confucius who stated, “When a goal cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goal, adjust the action step” because with the knowledge from garbology we can
Littering can be a major fire hazard, all its takes is one discarded cigarette butt into a pile rubbish to ignite a towering inferno of sadness. If we litter too much garbage will pile up and will grow a harmful bacteria which would make us sick. It
Much of this trash ends up in the ocean harming not only marine life, but us too. However, this is not only happening in America it’s happening all over the world with China at 8.82 million metric tons of mismanaged waste. All this waste if caught in a gyre, can lead to one of the garbage patches. This has been happening since we started using plastic but it the garbage patches were discovered in the early 1990’s. We keep throwing trash away that keeps being misplaced, then it ends up in the oceans with the rest of the trash. I propose multiple solutions, to enforce plastic bag ban and to enforce recycling. California has banned the use of plastic bags, meaning that if you do use them a fine will be put in place. Environment California explained how before the plastic bag ban California used up to 19 billion plastic bags each year with less than five percent being recycled. However, we can change that. By using less plastic bags we harm the ocean less. Another solution is to each week collect each household’s trash, per pound of trash found in the recycling bin provided by the city should be a $11 fine. Tiffany Edmonds, Solid Waste Management Department spokeswoman, explained why they started the fine “ It is an attempt to change behavior. The fine covers the cost of sending a garbage collection truck to the house to pick up the contaminated recycling bin” this will encourage people to recycle. Since the plastic
People are constantly throwing trash outside their window when they are driving down the street or throwing trash on the ground when they are walking. As minor as littering is, there are long term effects. Trash that ends up in the storm drains, eventually make it’s way into the ocean. Once the trash is in the ocean, it can eventually make its way into a whales blowhole, or can be consumed by an animal; which could harm them. Also, trash that makes it’s way into lakes and oceans is very difficult to remove. If you cannot remove the trash, how are you going to prevent these animals from getting
When you are driving down the roads of Miami County, all you see is litter. My vision for the future of Miami County is to have little to no litter on the ground because it looks better, is better for the economy, and is better for the animals. Less litter is better looking to the eyes and is less trashy looking. That makes it look very trashy and makes it look like we all don’t care about the Earth and what shape it’s in. Less litter is also better for the economy, for the ground, and also for the water. Litter is very bad for the earth. Litter in the water can kill organisms. Litter on the ground pollutes the soil, which can pollute the plants that grow in the soil or can stop the plants from growing. If animals or humans eat the plants that
It may seem harmless and innocent, but littering is an unhealthy habit people of all ages in each country do every day. Littering is a second nature to some people; after doing it for so long and often, they do not realize they do it. As more and more people continue to litter, environments, animals, and humans are being harmed by people’s carless actions. Americans, as well as all humans, need to be more aware of how hazardous and costly littering is to the world and the creatures living in it. Littering shows lack of respect for the world, and needs to be prevented in order for future generations to live in a clean and healthy environment.
Carelessness and laziness are two common factors that contribute to littering. We have a piece of trash in our hands and a trash can is in site, yet we decide to just throw it on the ground. Littering has become second nature even if it is unintentional. We assume that the trash we throw will eventually disappear into thin air and it won’t affect our surroundings. Little do we know that every little piece of trash thrown out the window all adds up. That small piece becomes a pile of trash that ends up clogging storm drains, contaminating water and endangering wildlife. According to McWhorter, “Sustainability involves conserving resources to prevent their depletion, protecting ecological processes, and eliminating waste and pollution, so as to ensure that our society’s pratices can continue and our civilization can endure” (p. 394).
People tossing out trash means that they don’t care what happens to it as long as it’s out of their car or house. People should think of the impact they can cause the environment if they recycle properly, reusing water bottles, and when they go grocery shopping bring a reusable bags that won’t be thrown out into streams and lakes that will cause pollution to the environment. If someone throws garbage where it shouldn’t belong then throw it out for them to keep the environment clean.
American citizens throw away millions of tons of garbage each year, and this trash has to go somewhere. While there are projects underway to clean and reuse this refuse most of it gets dumped into huge landfills. These landfills are disgusting festering blisters on our country's landscape. But people continue to consume and throw away more and more in the name of convenience. As they see it, when things get old, throw it away and get a new one. They blame the government for the trash problem, but the truth blame should be placed on themselves.