I got this picture of one of those flimsy plastic grocery bags sitting in the middle of Grafton Square this afternoon... It got blown down the street right after I took the picture.
All day, I kept my eyes open for these things wafting around in the breeze because... well... because it's an item in the news today.
I did sorta-kinda go into a medium
rant on this subject yesterday, but last night's City Council meeting resulted in the agenda item being slightly massaged, rather than really going anywhere just yet.
Meanwhile, I wanted to try to put myself into Konnie Lukes' frame of mind on the whole thing and ask, "Why would this bother me?... and not some other form of litter?"
The answer I came up with is that this particular type of litter is probably the most noticeable... because it moves.
It's trash in motion that sets the plastic bags apart. If you compare this trash in motion to other equally odious litter which doesn't move as much, or at all, then maybe the mindset that focuses on the plastic bags is more easily understood.
There are just as many opportunities to spot empty plastic milk (water, juice, etc) jugs lying around the landscape here in Worcester. Plastic grocery bags certainly don't predominate in the local litter landscape...
The gallon size jug is the most prevalent, simply because the wind can blow them out of recycling bins on trash day... if you don't crush them, and/or if you overfill the bin.
The half gallon size doesn't make much of a showing, but the gallon sized ones, since they're closer in shape to actually being round, are almost as easily spotted around town as the evil plastic grocery bags... especially on a windy trash day.
These are prone to being blown around on the ground, but unlike the plastic bags, they don't sail through the air unless the wind is blowing like a hurricane. If you run over one, it won't melt onto your muffler or cling to your front grill. And they'll probably never make it far enough off the ground to paste itself to your windshield.
And, most importantly, it would be a lot more difficult to ban them.
Most litter is pretty much inert.
For the most part, it simply doesn't move around enough in the wind to catch your eye.
Mostly, litter is just random stuff that people with no sense of conscience or community simply let fly... like cows taking a dump as they graze...
But the proliferation of trash in any city in the northeast is simply a fact of life. There's usually plenty of opportunity to spot pieces of trash lying around.
The point is, it's usually just lying there. If it isn't moving, wafting along even in the gentlest of breezes, then there probably won't be any Worcester City Councilors who'll get it into their heads to enact an ordinance to ban it.
Besides, there are other laws being broken, anyway.
Littering is subject to stiff fines.
But that doesn't stop people from tossing their trash into the street.
Which brings me to wonder how far legislators could go in curtailing disposable containers of any kind...
There's a
bottle bill that was passed in Massachusetts quite a long time ago.
And yet, there are quite a few people who work the trash day sections of the city every week, collecting bottles out of recyclers, street to street, because there's a deposit that can be gotten on each one.
Besides that, there isn't a day that goes by when I wouldn't be able to spot one or more of these folks who are so down on their luck that they're scouring the roadside for 5 cent returnable bottles that people simply toss out their car windows.
I'm not sure if those water bottles are return deposit though...
There are many classes of litter...
We could probably be as general or as specific as we wanted to be in classifying the different types of litter that can be found in any random search around the city's streets.
But for the purposes of this post... there are really only two.
One type of litter are the plastic grocery bags that, apparently, Konnie Lukes sees everywhere she goes.
The other type is
everything else.
