A rant on the rampant littering across the blocks of downtown, the part of Iowa City with more trashcans than anywhere else in town.
As the snow melts along the benches outside Uncle Sun, the greyed dirty snow reveals three or four maroon menus from Szechuan House, another Chinese restaurant a few blocks away. The menus are accompanied by the butts of a few specialty cigarettes, those kind with the little plastic lip-nip, and though they litter the ground they sit mere inches from a public trash can. I can’t remember when the menus appeared there, but the cigarette things appeared in the most recent week. As the weather warms more, the snow piles (having dwindled nearly completely) are now marked only by sand patches filled with collections of rubbish. One of the menus make their way to a mish-mosh of leftover leaves, cigarette butts, bottle caps, and the inevitable fireball shooter. The others, I hope, must have found their way to the trash.
I think as a walker, I’ve always been slightly more-than averagely aware of litter around downtown. As an environmentally conscious person (and former Zoo-Tycoon player), littering itself is something I’ve always tried to avoid, but since moving downtown I’ve become more and more fascinated with the various trash trails that people leave behind. My physical proximately raises my awareness, yet what I am truly shocked by is the laziness of this particular littering. Sure, for most, it isn’t their neighborhood. Yet, I still cannot grasp the general carelessness of littering wherever you live on the planet.
Sometimes, the litter downtown makes me laugh, in the soft, sadly ironic sort of way that you laugh when you know there is nothing else to do. I pick up scraps of paper, read receipts, and put together stories about the previous owners. Once I found a whole letter written about somebody's grandfather's soup. Last week, a mysterious birthday card to someone named Lucas. One of my favorites (although not technically trash) was the pile of cherry-red vomit directly beneath a Crayola 'Crayon' specials poster in the Brother's window. More often though, the trash is made up of beer cans, broken glass, or grocery lists. I’ve come back to this piece over and over, throughout the past few weeks. An erased, but faintly visible reminder on my whiteboard reads, “Trash: What do you want to SAY?” and for once, I find my reaction is more physical than verbal. I want to scream at the litterbugs. I want to shake their shoulders and yell the word ‘why’ like a banshee; not care if I spit in their face. There are trashcans everywhere downtown.
Perhaps the menus fell out of the bag as the trash was being collected. The realm of possibilities is infinite, but I’ve spoken to several of the trash collectors, and it seems unlikely to me. I asked them once, how they felt about the trash left behind, and they said they were just glad to be paid double for overtime, on holidays, and the days after home football games. They do an excellent job. I wish we had can-only bins so those collecting cans didn’t have to wade through the garbage to earn their five cents.
Usually, I’m not an angry person, but I’m so sick but of the disrespect this behavior shows for our planet and for other people. I’d like to think there was a good reason for all those Schezuan House menus. Perhaps they blew out of the bin? Is there another good reason to leave them there- further from the top of the bin than in inches away from its base on the ground? I want to believe that whoever left the menus there probably meant to toss them, but in all my best attempts at alleviating the blame from the original holder, the trash downtown tells me a different story.
Over the course of a few months, I watch a bag of potato chips caught, trapped frozen, in the snow the only exposed edge wearing thin till the metal lined material is clear. I wonder where the metal lining goes. On the stairs at work, I watch another Ruffle- this time a single potato chip, turn stale, then to crumbs as it is passed and stepped on throughout the semester. On the way in, down Burlington, I keep picking up the slips of papers, ignore the Trader Joe’s Mac & Cheese bites-box that has been sitting under the snow for months, worry about the person who trailed vomit down the entire length of the street a few months back. As an observer, I feel a disgusting complicity.
I hear myself sounding calloused, if it bothers you so much why don’t you just lean down and pick it up? But that can only hope to help alleviate the problem. I suppose at the core of my rage here is that I thought we were past littering- as far as environmental causes go. Isn’t that the bare-bare minimum? The kindergarten lesson of environmentalism we apparently have not mastered. I don’t think anyone’s perfect, where trash is concerned. I’m fairly certain modern human existence is impossible without environmental impact, but even if you don't recycle, you can make it to the trash bin.
Back last July, I went to a concert with some friends I’d run into downtown. Walking from Sauce Liquor to my friend’s car, a friend of my friend broke into the case of Busch Light they’d bought; leaving a trail of camouflage print cans in their wake. My throat tightened up and I choked back my words. Resisting the urge to tell off the boy, who’d been a few years above me back in high school, like I usually did when I saw groups of frat boys dropping their cans in bushes downtown. If you start a fight, you’re on your own, my best friend tells me over, but I am too angry at my cowardice to engage with strangers on the street anymore. They should know better.
In downtown Iowa City, there is a trash can nearly every fifty feet- if even that. On Saturday nights in the fall, or in the summer when the cans are overflowing and Yotopia cups are stacked haphazardly atop their covers, there is an alley on every block that contains four or five dumpsters. Maybe I was just raised in a granola bubble, but I think cleaning-up after yourself is the least you could be doing. And that goes for the blackout drunk students, who wouldn’t know a trashcan if they were puking beside it, too. There’s no excuse for the amount of litter that is constantly floating around Iowa City’s downtown.
I don’t know how to end this, so I think I just will. What example will shake your shoulders and get you to understand how important caring about our home planet is? I’m hoping most readers of this piece already actively consider the environmental impact of our habits, but if you do not that's a pretty deep shame. We’ve got to make a whole lot of changes beyond littering if we want to mitigate the havoc we’ve already inflicted on this planet. The U-turn we need to make, is much more than a three-point turn, but I thought we had passed this starting point long ago. The metal-lining left to disintegrate, does not disappear. Get with the program, it's really not that hard
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