“OI!” my husband said. “What now?”
I counted aloud. Fifteen empty plastic bottles, some squashed quite flat. Several had held various kinds of water. Others had contained milk, Coke, car oil and sugar-sweetened drinks.
My haul also included six or seven cans, several of which were also squashed flat, six very damp, disposable coffee cups two empty cigarette boxes, an empty sheet of Strepsils, and a miscellany of indeterminate paper and plastic trash.
I had laid sheets of newspaper on the worktop and emptied the contents of the now very grubby shopping bag on top of it.
“This,” I explained, was just some of the trash I had recently collected while walking along a quiet, beautiful little road not far from where I lived.
One of the few roads left where you actually get to see wild primroses and daffodils on the hedges. In between the trash.
Both ends of this winding little roadway intersect with larger, busier, roads containing much more traffic, so I don’t do a loop.
I just walk the length of the little road, back and forth, which takes nearly an hour and around 9,000 steps, according to my old Fitbit.
This road is so pretty in spring that one day something in me just rose up and revolted at the sight of the plastic bottles and cans, the paper and crisp bags thrown into ditches on top of clumps of primroses, stuck on newly-budded branches or rolling along the sides of the road.
So I started crumpling a thin shopping bag and stuffing it into my pocket. I used it to collect the larger trash eyesores on my walk. Each day, after 25 or 30 minutes up one side of the road and 25 or 30 minutes or so back down the other, I returned to the starting point of my walk with a bulging plastic bag mostly full of plastic bottles. Straight into my recycling bin.
The only day I actually categorised and counted the contents was last Sunday, but the bag was equally full of the same kind of rubbish every other day I did this exercise.
So, taking the average view, let’s say over a period of four days, on one relatively quiet, relatively short road, I collected in the region of, believe it or not, 60 empty plastic bottles, 32 cans, 24 disposable cups and God knows how much paper and plastic trash.
Some of the litterers had, I noticed, considerately stuffed everything from baby-wipes to crisp bags into the empty bottles before chucking them out the car window.
That, presumably, was their nod to helping care for the environment, and perhaps something I should have been grateful for, though I found this difficult.
One day, another walker caught up with me and accompanied me along some of the way.
“What are you doing with the bag?,” she asked me. I told her. Not wanting to sound too complacent and Californian about it, I just explained that it gave me enormous pleasure to walk along this beautiful little roadway, and that I had decided to do my part in clearing away the trash that littered it. Little by little. Bag by bag. Step by step. Walk by Walk.
I thought she’d smirk at my foolishness and pass on but she was unexpectedly enthusiastic. She walked this road regularly too, she said, and she too hated the sight of all the trash.
“That’s a great idea. I’ll shove a shopping bag into my pocket when I go home and I’ll fill it the next day I come out. Sure, it’s all just for the recycling bin anyway,” she said.
Imagine if every walker did this; shoved a bag in their pocket on the way out and filled it with the plastic bottles and paper cups which deface and degrade our ditches and hedgerows, brought it home, and put it in the recycling bin!
What a difference it would make to our despoiled countryside!
Because if we don’t, well, nature will have to wait 450 years for a plastic bottle to decompose. The same for a six pack of plastic rings. Yes, 450 years.
Disposable nappies? 500 years. Plastic straws? 200 years. Up to 50 years for a tin can. Up to 100 years for an aluminium can.
Disposable coffee cups – it seems many of these are not recyclable because of the plastic membrane that lines them. They can take up to 30 years to degrade.
A few more examples: twenty years for a plastic bag, 12 for a cigarette butt. Five years for one little piece of plastic-coated paper.
Even the innocent, biodegradable stuff, that so many of us think is not so bad to throw into the roadside can take a surprisingly long time to decompose. An apple core. Up to two months. Orange or banana peel – up to two years.
Think about that the next time you’re tempted to chuck something out the car window.
Instead of throwing stuff out the window, maybe put one of those thin shopping bags in the pocket of your hiking jacket and use it to collect someone else’s trash instead.
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‘Why bother’ mindset lingers ... what’s happened to people? More in this section
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