Some years ago, my running friend Nancy arranged a trash pickup after the Palace Saloon 5K. This involved spending about an hour and a half picking up trash in the hot Florida sun. We runners created a pile of overstuffed trash bags full of a diversity of discarded debris.
On my training runs, I routinely pick up litter in San Luis Park. This ranges from the expected (discarded cans) to the unusual (a stereo system). These adventures in litter caused me to think about issues related to litter and especially the cost of litter.
One obvious cost of litter is the aesthetic damage. Litter is ugly and makes an area look, well, trashy. One of the many reasons I pick up litter is that I prefer not to run through trashy places.
Another obvious cost of litter is the environmental damage. Some of this is obvious, such as oil or paint leaking from discarded cans. Other damage is less obvious, such as erosion and flooding that can be caused by litter clogging storm drains. There is also the harm done to animals directly, such as sea life killed when their stomachs fill with plastic debris. As with the aesthetic damage, the cost of the litter is largely paid by those who did not litter—such as the turtles and seabirds harmed by discarded items.
A less obvious cost is that paid by people who pick up the litter. For example, I take a few minutes out of almost every run to dispose of trash discarded by others. There are also walkers in my neighborhood who pick up trash during their entire walk—I will see them carrying full bags of cans, bottles and other debris that have been thrown onto the streets, sidewalks and lawns. Unlike my home state of Maine, Florida does not have a deposit on bottle and cans so there is no financial incentive to pick them up.
Those of us who clean up after the litterbugs pay with our time and effort. This is doubly annoying because the effort we need to expend to pick up the debris and dispose of it properly is more than the litterbug would spend to dispose of it. Litter is often scattered about, in pieces or tossed into the woods—thus making it a chore to pick up and carry. Also, carrying trash while running is more inconvenient than transporting it in a vehicle—and much of the trash beside the road is hurled from vehicles.
Some states, such as my home state of Maine, do shift some of the cost of litter to the litterer. To be specific, these states have a deposit on bottles and cans. When someone discards a can or bottle, they are throwing away the deposit—thus incurring a small cost for littering. When someone picks up the bottle or can, they can redeem it for the deposit—thus offsetting the cost of their effort. While this approach does not cover all forms of litter, it impacts the litter problem by providing people with an incentive to not litter or to pick up the litter thrown away by others.
This model of imposing a cost on littering and providing a reward for cleaning up litter is ethical. In terms of fairness, it seems right that the person littering should pay a price for the damage done and the cost imposed on others. It is also right that people who make the effort to clean up messes caused by others should receive compensation. The obvious challenge is making the model work on a broader scale beyond bottles and cans. I do, of course, think this should extend beyond mere personal littering, which is trivial when compared to the massive, organized littering of businesses.
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