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Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

Picking Up a Zillion Pieces of Litter

colinbartlett

Comments (45)

  • ajxs
    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-...
  • skyberrys
    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.
  • bombcar
    Be sure to check the second page: https://www.sixstepstobetterhealth.com/money.htmlIf 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.
  • chao-
    It only took him under one year to pick up the ONE MILLION cigarette butts:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3gK-X32cy8He started in 2020 and the video summary was made in 2021.
  • anon
    undefined
  • martin-adams
    What incredible work. I found his video on all the smoking products he found really interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3gK-X32cy8
  • sebmellen
    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.
  • antipollution
    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.
  • Isamu
    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.
  • Animats
  • RyanOD
    We do this in the summer when we visit the shores of Lake Michigan. The amount of washed up junk we find is shocking.
  • roflchoppa
    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...
  • autoexec
    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?
  • chihuahua
    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.
  • esafak
    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.
  • OutOfHere
    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.