Have you ever been driving down the road following a vehicle and watched as the driver pitched a bag of fast food trash out the window onto the roadside?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #10 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
I have many faults. But littering is not one of them.
I do confess, though, that if I have a pet peeve, it’s littering.
I know there are, let’s call them “worse sins,” in the world. But it still fries my grits when I see people toss trash, willfully acting with such disregard for not only nature but the people around them.
From an early age, I loved the outdoors, starting with Grandpa Rogers’s family farm. That built respect for nature and animals right into my DNA. Later, I learned that our Sovereign God created everything “very good” and charged human beings made in his image with responsibility to both develop and care for the environmental richness of the world. Sometimes this is called the “Cultural Mandate” (Gen. 1:26-28).
So with that I have always been constitutionally unable to throw trash on the ground and walk away from it. I simply can’t do it.
I remember exploring the woods as a kid and finding tin cans, bottles, or spent plastic shotgun shells, ones that someone else had left behind. I took them with me to the nearest trash container. If I found trash that was biodegradable, like food products, I usually kicked the garbage under a rock or buried it in a nearby hole. But one way or the other I had to do something with somebody else’s litter—a habit I continue to this day.
I remember a time awhile back on the beach with my wife when I noticed a group of young people, late teens and early twenties, occupying some sand near us. I was reading a book and looked up after the group left. To my surprise and disgust, I noted that the area around where the group’s blankets had been, was—you guessed it—littered with half-emptied plastic bottles, numerous pop cans, paper, and plastic wrappers from recently purchased inflatable floats.
Now I ask you, why are these youth so cavalier about littering? Who failed to teach them that the environment is a delicate balance, both ferocious and fragile, and given to us by God to steward during our time on earth? How did they reach the cusp of adulthood and not learn that littering hurts us all?
Littering is an act utterly without redeeming social value. Littering yields no positive side effects. Littering is pollution, and it is inconsiderate, immature, and irresponsible.
Littering is an affront to the beauty and function of God’s creation. There’s something about trash strewn across God’s handiwork that grates on the eye, the mind, and the soul.
If someone’s cast-off stuff is truly biodegradable, then I don’t get too worked up. Although even these kinds of products, depending upon where they are discarded, can harm the local ecosystem. That’s why it’s illegal, or should be, to jettison untreated effluvium from your boat’s tanks into inland or coastal waters.
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E-cigarettes are a new litter: vaporizers, pods, batteries, are now being discarded everywhere and the environmental damage is, worse, longer lasting than a cigarette’s paper and filters.
Meanwhile, cigarette butts remain #1 litter worldwide. 18 billion butts discarded per day or 4.5 trillion annually. Butts take 18 months to 12 years to decompose. So, they are biodegradable—sort of. Even when they degrade, tobacco product waste contains 7,000 toxic chemicals that leach into soil and water.
The number of cigarette butts littered per year can be laid end-to-end to moon and back 300 times. And 80% of butts littered worldwide end up in the water system.
By some estimates, cigarette butts account for 38% of non-biodegradable litter items worldwide and up to 21% of coastal waste.
Plastic straws are pollution, but they don’t make the top five of any anti-pollution group’s list. So, while I’m all for using paper straws, this corporate-bad-item “du jour” is a drop in the bucket compared to cigarette butts.
By the way, cigarette-related deaths in the US stand at about 480,000 per year. This is why, the first question I’m asked at the Dr’s office, after my birthdate, is “Do you smoke?”
Cigarette butts are a universal and ubiquitous pollution.
I walk with our dog on a country road near our home. Given that it’s a secluded gravel road, finding pitched beer cans and assorted debris in the ditches and even over into cornfields, is a regular occurrence. Teenagers—and I’m sure a certain number of adults—don't want to get caught with evidence and their solution is to discard the contraband out the car window.
After a long winter, last spring on one trek I picked up 44 cans and bottles strung along just .3 mile. I’ve picked up truck tires, trash bags full of torn-off old roofing materials, pallets, and recently, an broken down double love-seat tossed into the ditch, all this on property that does not belong to the eco-polluter.
In my estimation, littering is an act of disrespect, immaturity, irresponsibility, and laziness. It’s the unwillingness to expend enough energy to walk to a trash can, to stuff trash into your pocket until you find a waste receptacle, to place trash or garbage on the floor of your vehicle until you stop where disposal can be cared for properly.
Littering is damaging, destructive, and sometimes dangerous.
No matter how you cut it, littering is wrong.
Well, we’ll see you again soon. For more Christian commentary, be sure to subscribe to this podcast, Discerning What Is Best, or check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
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