LITTER/TRASH

Someone once said the only things certain in life are death and taxes. I think we can add a third topic to that list-litter. I walk and bike all around the area, in town and on trails and on the beaches. Where does this stuff come from. I walk downtown from our house which is less than a mile. I come across beer cans, coffee cups, cigarette packs, candy bar wrappers, and assorted other trash all the time. And one section of our street, someone throws half smoked cigars away. And they are always in the same place, about 4 inches long and an inch thick. What is the story with that?

I know someone in town who walks the Plum Island beaches all the time and he has found pieces of trash on the beach for every letter of the alphabet A through Z. I wonder what he found for X, a xylophone? And this trash is all over the place despite trash barrels being well placed throughout the city and picked up on a regular basis. And how about those bags of dog poop that are left on the rail trails and hiking trails. Who do they think is going to monitor the trails for that and pick them up? Yikes.

If we all picked up just two pieces of trash a day, that is 730 pieces of trash a year. But I don't ever pick up Kleenex or paper towels and most of the time I have some type of glove on, depending on the weather. I have never gotten sick or had an infection. If everyone in Newburyport, Ma. picked up that 730 pieces of trash a year, that is over 12 million pieces of trash! Wow. We already have a pretty clean city. Then we would be really spiffy and we would all do our part to make our little piece of Spaceship Earthy a little greener.