Natural Reality Check

The Ground Is Not a Trash Can

The title of this entry should be self evident to all adults! But I have found first hand that it is horrifyingly absent in a lot of people's common sense.

Apparently, I was the only one in my town who was raised by a mother who told them not to litter. Today I am taking it upon myself to share what I know about why you shouldn't throw things you're done using onto the ground. Maybe if people understand why it's so dangerous, they'll clean up their act!

The most common waste I see as I walk through town includes, beer cans, plastic bottles, medical face masks, used diapers and cigarette butts.

These things don't just magically disappear when you throw them on the ground. They sit there leaching the things inside them into the ground and eventually into the waterways, aquifers and soil. The sun hits the plastics and they turn into smaller broken down pieces of plastic.

Some people may be thinking "so what? This doesn't hurt me. No one will know I threw my Aquafrio bottle into that pond. My smoking only hurts me and everyone throws their butts on the ground!"

Well, guess what? Even if it's not you directly, your litter will hurt someone. It's not just the sea turtles, fish and salamanders that suffer. Humans are impacted by the improper disposal of waste too!

According to the University of Berkeley, https://www.oceancare.org/en/stories_and_news/cigarette-butts-pollution/ and myriad other sources that aren't in big tobacco's pocket, cigarette butts contain lead, nickel, arsenic and other toxic chemicals.

Sadly, this is one of the most common forms of waste. Hundreds of thousands of butts get picked up by ocean and environmental cleanups. This shouldn't be normal!

To explain how toxins from these disgusting cylinders get into the soil and water, let me remind you of something. The water cycle. Even if your cigarette butt doesn't start a fire. If you leave it out in the open the rain falls on it and all seven thousand of those lovely toxic and carcinogenic chemicals inside flow out of the butts into storm drains and waterways.

Think about this process repeated hundreds of thousands of times, all over your cities, countrysides, roadways and wetlands. Seriously irresponsible smokers, thanks for killing off your neighbors, shortening all our lives!

If you're going to smoke, at least make sure you're putting the butts into an ashtray. Then empty that into a trash can, so hopefully waste management can deal with the hazardous waste appropriately. That way, you are only hurting you and the people around your second hand smoke!

So face masks and disposable diapers. We needed one during the Pandemic.(Not going to name it, pretty sure we all know which one.) The other prevents incontinent children and adults alike from making a mess everywhere.

Yeah, okay, at first glance these may seem like necessary evils, but they're not. Yes I wore a face mask during those two extremely long years they were mandated. Yes I wore diapers as a small un-potty trained infant. Still in these instances, reusable beats disposable.

Why? Well let's say you're like the absolutely vile tourists in a mini van that decided to throw baby doe's poopy diaper onto the side of the road...right outside my house.

If I hadn't gone out there and picked it up, and disposed of it in our trash, what would've happened?

Let's start with the poop. Any human(or cat or dog or etc.)feces, without a doubt, contain disease causing organisms. Best case scenario is a non-lethal strain of e.coli. There are other worse door prizes waiting to ooze out of that soiled diaper. They include, Noroviruses, Hepatitis A, Adenoviruses, Influenza A, Salmonella shigella(food poisoning), Cryptosporidium, Cholera(yes that's still a thing, especially in the developing world), oh so many forms of dysentery, and other communicable diseases. So if you made it through that list, congratulations, you know why poo is gross.

By leaving disposable diapers out in the open, in nature or on the ground, you're exposing everyone to those horrible sicknesses. That's not a favor. Neither is all the microplastics released into the environment by diapers and other sources.(More on what those are in a moment!)

Face Masks, again, you throw those on the ground, they will not magically disappear. In fact as you're wearing them, your spit hits the mask and gets trapped. That's the idea. Because your spit contains bacteria and viruses.

When they get left in the gutter, sidewalks, fields and so forth, those germs are still there. There's also plastic pollution released too. This comes from the elastic loops and fibers in your Face Mask. If you truly care, be aware of what you do with these objects.

Now why, if these objects are so germ covered, would you want reusable ones?

First, let me state that there's these fabulous innovations. They are called washing machines, plant based detergents, soap, and hand washing. These are available. If you are too squeamish to clean diapers, maybe there's a business in your area that launders things like that.(I'm just putting it out there.) And, thanks to science, we now know that twenty-one to thirty seconds of thorough scrubbing of wrists, palms, fingers and nail beds will eradicate most of the germs on your hands! That makes re-usable diapers and face masks more than feasible.

So before I tackle plastic containers, let me talk about beer containers. Alcohol, even the grain based alcohol humans enjoy, is poisonous. It kills things on a cellular level. Beer, wine and spirits just do it at a slower rate than say iso-propyl(rubbing alcohol).

Even after the booze is gone, the containers are still problematic. Not only do the glass ones leave dangerous shards all over the place when chucked at high velocity, there are other dangers too. There's lead and cadmium in the painted decorations. Not to mention other metals like tin and aluminum. Our friend the water cycle will disperse these into the soil and waterways. More yummy poison anyone?

That brings me to the final problem. The one most talked about. Plastic in its myriad forms. Whether it's in bottles or any other form of litter I've mentioned, we've got our hands full.

Animals not only get stuck entangled or injured by our waste products. When
it end up in a wetland, ocean or other natural environments, it can be mistaken for food. If it's lucky it doesn't die of starvation or bowl perforation. But something more insidious is afoot, microplastics.

These tiny particles break off of bigger pieces of waste. When ingested, they go on to mimic hormones in the body of animals and people. Some disrupt endocrine function, cause infertility, and disruption of the endocrine system can lead to diabetes, PCOS, developmental problems and maybe even cancer.

For the reader who is saying to themselves. "So what? Who cares if some fish in India or where ever eats plastic? It doesn't affect me." More bad news, it does. See, that type of stuff tends to concentrate up the food chain. So even if a tuna ate a plankton that ate a microplastic, there's going to be more bad stuff in that tuna than there is in any animal lower on the food chain.

Our civilizations are more interconnected than we realize. Our food in any one country comes from all over the world. So that fish in another country where the waters are filled with plastic waste might just end up on your plate.

This isn't just a carnivore problem. If you're vegan or vegetarian, microplastics still impact you. According to Science Alert, microplastics are entering human blood streams. That means even if we don't eat meat of any kind, the water we drink contains plastic pollution. Isn't that really sad?

I think it is. I also think it is beyond time to clean up our act as humans. The Anthropocene doesn't have to continue to be a pile of rubbish.

So what can everyone do? First and foremost stop throwing your trash on the ground! Whether it's the city, country, ocean or natural environment, take responsibility for your trash. Hold onto it till you can properly dispose of it! Whether that's a compost bin, recycling(if available), or trash can, that is where your trash belongs. Also, if someone could get around to inventing more biodegradable packaging that'd be great because the current stuff will kill us.