Do you know this man?

This man leaves me speechless. Had I been there for the actual event he wouldn't have gotten away with it and would probably have heard a bit about it from me. (Perhaps a good thing as he is a very large man and doesn't look too friendly).

Now many of you know how much I HATE litterers. Drives me crazy. It is, to me, one of the most disrespectful acts I can imagine to throw your garbage on public property. You might as well be shouting at the world "I'm important and I find ALL of the rest of you so unimportant that I feel it appropriate to throw crap in your face." Because really, whether it is on the train, or on the sidewalk or on the street, this is MY space and Your space and Everyone's space and we have a right to have it as clean and beautiful as possible and have gone through the trouble of developing an intricate method of disposing waste that most find quite easy and convenient to use--and at NO COST! We don't charge you to throw your garbage away in public trashcans and we try to have lots of them out and available for anyone who needs to use one. In reality we ALL pay for these trashcans and the people who remove the garbage from them. We, as a society, consider it important enough that we devote our tax dollars to it; it is there in the same category with road repair, water mains, public education and national defense.

And in recent years we have learned that over half of our waste can avoid going to our already overcrowded landfills, and can reduce our (already too large) energy consumption, and can provide alternatives to using new materials, and can reduce our toxic emissions through recycling. It is another thing that we as a society have come to accept as an important and vital change that we must embrace and that we expect our government to enable and allow us participation in.

So when a member of our community has the level of disrespect and gall to take a recycling container, meant to allow the public the option of recycling their waste, and takes the bag off the container and throws it away in the trash--in order to make more room for his comfort, it is beyond sad, beyond upsetting or disheartening. It makes me angry. I have no words for the pain such a slap in the face causes. Not only is he obviously not going to recycle his own waste, but he is removing from countless others the option that they had to recycle.

If anyone knows who this man is, please dump a large bag full of garbage on his desk. Because this is the space that was filled in a landfill with materials that COULD have been recycled had it not been for his disrespectful act.

And please, feel free to print out a picture of him and put it wherever those who might find him could see it. People like this need outed.

---

Visit my other blog here