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Litterbugs soiling our collective front yard

It is both baffling and infuriating that many people still seem to believe that it's their right to throw their trash wherever they want.

What's so hard about waiting until you can drop your used coffee cup in a garbage can?

Better yet, get one that's reusable, or at least take that used cup home and put it in your compostables.

It is repulsive to be driving along the road and see where some idiot has tossed their fast food bag out the window of their vehicle into the middle of the road, like the kilometres they put between them and it makes it magically disappear.

Disappear it doesn't.

In fact, the garbage seems to multiply like bacteria. Soon that one bag has split open after someone ran it over, or a flock of crows found it. Now it's a paper bag (recyclable) a soft drink cup plus straw and lid rolling around by the road's centre line, and a couple of cardboard or Styrofoam containers for the burger or chicken and fries.

And that's if the individual who did the littering didn't also toss the ketchup and salt packets, too.

It's disgusting.

And totally preventable if people would just quit being messy slobs. Would it have killed them to just wait until they got home to throw it away?

Another favourite are the cigarette butts that people toss either while walking or driving.

They're just little, right? But think foam packing peanuts - they multiply quickly and get scattered everywhere, creating a smelly, sodden mess that nobody wants to have to pick up.

Bags full of dog excrement are another story altogether. Consider the insanity of being willing to pick up and bag your dog's

poop, but not to put that bag in a garbage can. It's nuts.

These examples just address the relatively small, everyday kind of littering, too.

The folks who take truckloads of refuse out into the woods or onto rural roadsides and just dump it all are another kind of offender.

What it comes down to is being responsible for your own mess.

This is what we're all taught as children (we hope). Most people wouldn't go out to their front yard and just dump the garbage.

Public places are our collective front yard. Knock it off.

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