Picking up trash

Over the last few weeks, I have start­ed pick­ing up trash on the way to work.

At the moment, one of the great bless­ings of my life is that I get to cycle to work, on a beau­ti­ful path along the riv­er. There is a lit­tle stretch where there is a lot of lit­ter among the trees and bush­es. It nev­er gets picked up (I have great appre­ci­a­tion for the hard work the munic­i­pal work­ers in my city are doing, nev­er­the­less I dis­agree with how they take care of plants and lit­ter). It occurred to me this win­ter that instead of com­plain­ing to myself that the lit­ter does not get picked up, I could do some­thing about it. It took months to final­ly start, but I am so glad I did!

The first sur­prise is that there is a lot of trash. It is almost frac­tal — the more you look, the more you find, since the lit­ter breaks down with time and gets cov­ered by the plants and fall­en leaves. It also keeps com­ing back, as peo­ple keep lit­ter­ing reg­u­lar­ly. And all this on a tiny, 200-metre stretch of land in one of the most eco­log­i­cal­ly-con­scious coun­tries in the world.

The sec­ond sur­prise is how easy it is to just pick up trash. There was a large psy­cho­log­i­cal bar­ri­er to over­come before I could start, but the very moment after I pulled out my first lit­tle plas­tic bag, things became easy. Pick­ing up trash requires no prepa­ra­tion and so very lit­tle effort. Three times a week, I spend maybe ten min­utes fill­ing up a small bag on my way to work, throw away the bag in a bin togeth­er with my sin­gle-use glove, and then I get to see the result on the way back in the evening.

A great part of the spark came from see­ing, three years ago, a pho­to of Gary Chris­ten­son, May­or of Malden (MA, US) on the inter­net. Any­way this just to say, if you are hes­i­tat­ing too, go for it!