For a discontinuous ten years, five before and five after a divorce, I've picked up trash on the three-quarter mile walk to work. It's a scenic stretch of a side street that runs beside the west branch of Price Run, the only above-ground creek in the karst town of Lewisburg, West Virginia. The road is bisected by two ponds, watering holes for assorted fowl and furry fauna who've watched me fill a shopping bag at least once a week. That's five-hundred and twenty Kroger bags of other people's garbage.
The content of my gift bags has changed over this decade of walks. The fast food detritis - Hardee's in winter, Dairy Queen in summer - has transitioned to water bottles and candy wrappers. Scattered along the way, literally and temporally, has been evidence of addictions, though packaging has progressed from Diet Coke to designer spritzers, Bud Light cans to mini-liquor bottles, Marlboro reds to Juul whites. It seems the litterers in my neighborhood are becoming more sophisticated, to say the most.
After these ten years I'd like to conclude that the volume of litter has decreased as awareness of plastic pollution has grown, but householders still leave the lids off their trash cans for crows and raccoons to scatter. Teens of all ages jettison the evidence. The wind forever blows through yards, shops, and backends of pickup trucks. One can only hope that the materials of human consumption will become more compostable as we run out of extractable hydrocarbons. In the meantime, I'll shoot for two bags a week.
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