Why do people litter?

Because they are know nothing

but Ass*****....... I see it all the time when i am running.......It just really pisses my off.....hope to catch someone doing it..........:-(

It’s because the majority of people on this planet are selfish trash who really don’t care about anything that is outside of their minuscule world view

I enjoy littering. Really, I truly enjoy the thrill of chucking a bag of BK out the window when no one is looking. I have to pay taxes for these POS roads, so I should be able to litter on them.

I'd say laziness and a lack of concern accounts for most it.

Littering is the highest crime as you do it intentionally. Even murder can be accidental. If i was world leader - instant death sentence .

It's being lazy.

I can understand illegal dumping a bit more because (at least here) you have to pay to put those things in the tip.

I can reply to that in one word. Attitude.

The large trash items, obviously are blatant. But after following garage trucks on the highway and on my way to work, you don't think about what flies out of the back of those trucks as they drive. Some of it is surely from idiots ( I had someone throwing a Mcdonald's bag in my yard once a week a few summers back....probably someone supposed to be on a diet), but quite a bit comes from trash collection itself.

I would say that highways look super clean compared to cities. Go to a smaller city or the non-downtown part of a major city where the city or businesses don't fund a dedicated trash pick-up company and you will see trash everywhere.

It's a thing that city people like to do. I hate city people. They're disgusting.

Last year, as I was walking by, some lady just through her coffee cup on the ground to get rid of it. There was a public trash can on the street about 20 feet from her so I picked it up and put it in the trash can. When I turned and looked at her she told me, "It's a free country."

travel a lot, Asians are the worst, so sad the nicest beaches in the world are being destroyed. For example, was in Singapore, the city river had so many plastic bottles floating on top you couldn't see the topwater.

There are some woods across from my house that people have used as a dump for years.

My row of houses was built recently and think most of it was from when it was a pass through road without many houses.

It looks pretty bad. A lot of it is drive by toss their meal trash but some of the items are big and took effort and thought to dispose of it there.

There is an official county dump less than three miles form my house.

I live out in the country, and it seems people see our ditches as a dumping ground. As the person mentioned earlier, old appliances, mattresses, tires, etc... A couple weeks ago, in the ditch across the road from my house, someone dumped a dining room table and 5 chairs. Actually didn't look like there was anything wrong with them. And we have a Goodwill and Salvation Army store in the area.

I see one stretch of road near us where there is a scattering of pint vodka bottles all along for about 2 miles. I suspect that a person regularly must pick one up on the way home from work and downs it before getting home and tosses it out when finished to hide it from their family. Always a pint bottle, always the same brand.

Pet peeve of mine is in store parking lots, seeing people in parked cars open their door, empty their ash tray on the pavement next to the car, and close their door. Have seen this a bunch of times.

I see this in certain parks that are in...lower class areas. Garbage all over the place, even though there are trash barrels everywhere.

It is beyond my comprehension why you would intentionally trash your own neighborhoods and parks.

Somebody else will pick it up.

In Switzerland, American tourists come here and ask: "how come is it so clean?"

Answer: "because we clean it"

I'd like to see an intensive ad campaign like we had back in the 70's ... Remember "Woodsie Owl says Don't Pollute". That sheet came on television all the time and, I dunno, maybe it stuck with me or maybe I followed my parents example but I don't pollute. I went out yesterday with a trash bag and trash picker and cleaned up a section of bike path about a block from my house. I drive by it every day and it slowly wears on me to see the litter accumulate. Every two weeks or so I go out there and pick it up. A lot of coffee cups and BK drink cups etc but also, as another poster related, a lot of obvious garbage that blows out of the garbage trucks.

I'm afraid if I ever see someone actually throw their trash on the ground while I'm around I may be going to jail.

BTW, I live in San Jose, CA and if you call your waste removal provider they will take away one large item on trash collection day for free! Yep, a couch, a water heater, a refrigerator, toilet etc. Yet I still see crap like that dumped on the roads. WTF is wrong with people?!

Littering is a trigger topic because it is something we all do at some point or another. Yep, even me, even you. And if you say that you don't, then you illustrate the reality of why littering happens even more effectively. A bloated sense of rightness. It is right to litter. It is right not to litter. So here comes the boring, deflating solution. Take that frustration when you see litter and organize your own litter pick-up!

:::the sound of letsrun posters leaving the thread:::

The Earth Stewards is one man in NC who has single handedly picked up hundreds of thousands of bags of trash. Is he triggered by littering? No actually he is motivated by it. He uses social media to ask people to point him towards dump sites, invites people of thte community out to help him. I live in his area, he is one of those savants who is totally inspiring to witness and models a degree of simple positivity that can bet lost in these times:

https://www.theearthstewards.com/how-to-lead-a-cleanup

In most cases it's just simple ignorance. When I was younger I was guilty of littering because I didn't think what what I was doing was wrong. It didn't occur to my brilliant little mind that the trash would lay there until someone else picked it up. I remember they started running this commercial of a concerned looking American Indian lamenting the trash littering our beautiful Country. I thought ...oh! If you think the highways look bad now you wouldn't believe what they looked like in the '50s-'60s.

King Tiger wrote:

Littering is the highest crime as you do it intentionally. Even murder can be accidental. If i was world leader - instant death sentence .

Who is this person??