From "Watch now: 'Garbage man' cleans his Madison neighborhood one cigarette butt at a time" (Wisconsin State Journal)(video at link).
September 6, 2021
"After retiring from his 40-year career as a machine operator for Gardner Bakery about 10 years ago, Krieger, 72, filled his days with card games and visits with friends."
"After adding garbage collection to his hobbies, Krieger can’t go anywhere without stopping for litter. He even keeps a backup trash grabber in his car at all times, what he calls his 'gun.' 'In some ways I’m sorry I started, but then I’m thinking, "Just stop. Could you live with it?"' The answer, Krieger said, is always no."
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David Sedaris is a noted litter-picker-upper.
Ask yourself this question: why don't municipalities hire people part-time, non-union to do something this? Just pay people like this guy to do what he already wants to do for free.
Assign a territory they are responsible for, preferably in one's own neighborhood like Krieger. Accountability is how the area looks week to week.
Ask yourself: why not?
It goes to the heart of why nothing in government seems to work anymore.
One of the great Ian Frazier features from the New Yorker (and he's revisited the subject a number of times); snagging plastic bags from trees, etc., in New York City:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/01/12/bags-in-trees-a-retrospective
"Mister, we could use a man like him" here in Boulder, where I've been noticing used masks in the gutters on every block this summer.
Madison doesn’t deserve a person like this.
I frequently see men....private citizens.....walking with a garbage bag in the park, and picking up the litter.
So far, it's always been men.
"Ask yourself this question: why don't municipalities hire people part-time, non-union to do something this?"
It seems like one of these "community service" things that people do instead of prison time, as David Sedaris has noted:
"Pick up litter, and people assume that it’s your punishment, part of your court-mandated community service. Is it him who’s been breaking into toolsheds? they wonder. Him who’s been stealing batteries from parked cars? At first I worried what passersby might think, but then my truer nature kicked in, and I became obsessed. When that happened there was no room for anyone else, except, occasionally, for Hugh, who does his part but won’t pull the car over to collect every plastic bag he comes across. He can talk about litter, but when the topic shifts to the price of heating oil or the correct way to lay a paving stone, he can shift with it. For me, though, there is no other topic."
Sedaris, David. Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (p. 217). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
This was a question in r/askreddit a while back; if you became all powerful, no limits, what would be the first thing you would do with it? Without hesitation my answer was; Whenever anyone would litter, I would make it so that the litter would instantly reappear in that person’s place, whether it be a mansion, an apartment, trailer, a van, a tent or just a sleeping bag, or anywhere that person lay down for the night. That garbage would be right back to his or her own vicinity. It would take a while for the deplorables to catch on, but they get there.
This reminds me of a man who lived in Hyde Park, Chicago. He told me of how much he hated the litter in his immediate neighborhood. It occurred to him that most people didn't want to deal with their trash without an easy way to dispose of it rather than they being actively inconsiderate, so he put a trash can in front of his house. Lo and behold, the litter problem soon came under control.
Here's what's so good about what Sedaris and Krieger are doing and what can't be replaced by turning litter pickup into another job: They express the outrage at the mess and convey the message that it's wrong to litter and that can help end the practice.
By making it part of the city services, what we all pay taxes for, you undercut that expression. Oh, they pay people to pick this stuff up.
The best solution is for everyone to stop littering, not to turn picking up litter into a city function like picking up the trash enclosed in trash cans.
By the way, littering was a much worse problem in the 1950s, before the anti-littering ad campaigns. I remember when the roadside was full of trash — enough that there was a game out of looking for Lucky Strike packaging so that you could be the first to step on it and say "Lucky Strike," which entitled you to *punch* the person you were with.
AA, I agree with your take on the social ill of littering. I despise it.
Now if only we could all adopt the notion that graffiti is vandalism and not art, I could die a happy man. Well, nah, that's an exaggeration. But the point remains.
It would appear to me that this guy needs to do something that is meaningful to replace work and to his credit he is.
Damn. THAT'S why I kept getting punched on those long car rides?
For a while, back in the 80s and 90s, community groups would "Adopt-A-Highway" section and make themselves responsible for policing the litter along it. I haven't seen any such signage or evidence of the practice in a long time. Local Sons of Confederate Veterans camps were heavily involved, along with BSA troops etc.
For a long time, Memphis was the cleanest and quietest big city in the country. It was a point of civic pride, like the fact that there were more churches than gas stations here (supposedly).
When I take a walk in my waterproof shoes after a rain, my civic volunteer service is to clear out an obstructed rainwater drain so the low spot at the corner doesn't flood. I call it my Free The Rainwater Program, and it's as much fun as it was when I was 10.
We're not so clean any more.
This isn’t quite the same, but…
Many years ago my brother and I were driving along a road in Florida when he saw some “fresh” roadkill. He stopped the car and scooped the thing up into a black plastic trash bag and threw it into the back of the station wagon, telling me that it would be okay since he could tell it hadn’t been in the sun very long.
Well, I want you to know that we hadn’t gone 10 feel before the most God-awful, putrid smell overtook all the air in the car. I’ll never forget it.
He wanted to get the thing home where he could chemically remove the flesh, leaving the bones to build the skeleton.
I was more interested in Farrah Fawcett’s hairdo.
As a PI, who did a lot of insurance fraud surveillance, I saw quite a few characters. One gent was claiming permanent and total disability for back problem. That was fraudulent. His real disability was OCD. I saw, while doing surveillance on a windy early Spring day, that he would come out of his house and pick up small twigs that had fallen on his yard. He did this every 20-30 minutes all day. He would bend at the waist hundreds of times a day.
The man lived near a local high school. The students must have known his affliction because they would pass his house at lunch time, slow down and throw their fast food trash on his lawn and beep their horn. He would be out there in a matter of seconds picking up the litter.
Is there an implicit mandate against litter or are these would be patrimonialists
There is a young man on YouTube obsessed with clearing storm drains after rains to prevent flooding. His videos can get millions of. Jew because viewers appreciate his sincerity and enjoy watching water go down drains. This guy makes ad money videoing his good deeds. https://youtu.be/MV9dOHRDb3c
Before the Great Recession, I used to come home from a 2 mile walk to City Park with aluminum cans between all the fingers I could manage. Felt so virtuous. They've all but disappeared since 2008. But I have noticed a lot more trash on the streets this summer compared to the last dozen. Perhaps our "garbage man" quit. At least they don't toss out beer bottles like I remember Grandma picking up from her front yard in the 60's.
First winner of the new Parky Award.
There is a video of Philadelphia going around Twitter of a part of town filled with drug addicts and massive amounts of litter...
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1434518004876857347
One of the best parts of living in Tokyo was the cleanliness. One night we were out walking and a man was smoking (not unusual but seldom seen on the street). He took a last puff and bent over with his cigarette, and it looked like he was going to drop the butt on the ground. Instead, he dipped the burning end into a puddle of water and then put it in a little baggie to take home and throw away properly. Bear in mind, there are no public trash cans on the streets. Everyone takes their litter home with them.
What I proposed was in diametric opposition to "turning litter pickup into another job," much less a punishment. In other words, something that transcends being just another suck on the government teat.
Part-time. No union. No pension. Visual accountability. Imagine that! No wonder the government won't do it unless it's part of a court-ordered punishment. It's a threat to the legitimacy of their own rice bowls!
Comfortable with the assumption that "people will assume" the worst about people doing good? Community should mean knowledge. Isn't that what so-called civic "leaders" should be doing? Communicating about the "community"?
You could easily publicize these are community members doing this part-time at low wages (or partial property tax forgiveness) for the good of the community, and that your littering is an affront that ruins their day.
What this reveals is the much vaunted sense of "community" politicians ostensibly strive for very often is bullshit so thick you could stir it with a stick.
Littering in not the source of litter in San Francisco. Litter is from bums removing trash from trash cans in their search for cigarette butts and possibly something else of any value. This is why the garbage can prototypes cost $20K. The idea is to make the garbage hard to remove.
The government is US wince. You of course are free to have pipe dreams and then be upset that no one implements your crack pot ideas that you communicate to nobody of any consequence. I suggest you have another double of ivermectin with a hydrogen peroxide chaser. If it burns going down you know it's working
In Ireland there is a national "Tidy Towns" competition, with awards based on size categories. It's an uphill battle fighting litter in Ireland, but this creates a pretty strong community incentive.
I've noticed in Vietnam city workers with carts and brooms sweeping up trash from the roadsides and people casually discarding wrappers and such in the gutters. It seems to work reasonably well.
Why is there more litter in the POC neighborhoods than in the leafy affluent neighborhoods? I have been told by POC this is because the city does not do the job except in affluent areas. Could this be true?
I have always been pleasantly surprised by both men and women in NYC that clean their neighborhoods. I have witnessed it in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Sure NYC Sanitation picks up the trash and periodically sweeps the streets but these are folks with brooms sweeping the sidewalks. I guess it reminded me that although it’s New York City it’s inhabited by local neighborhood people who still care.
I have always been pleasantly surprised by both men and women in NYC that clean their neighborhoods. I have witnessed it in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Sure NYC Sanitation picks up the trash and periodically sweeps the streets but these are folks with brooms sweeping the sidewalks. I guess it reminded me that although it’s New York City it’s inhabited by local neighborhood people who still care.
So he's picking it up to throw it out? That's cool. I thought he might have been finding uses for things people throw out.
Remember freegans. They were a thing a few years back. I wonder what happened to them.
Yeeesh. You have to wonder which comment of mine, other than my anodyne comments on this thread about paying people a stipend to pickup litter, is the one that truly pissed-off Howard.
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