The constant nuisance of littering

If you search the internet for the definition of littering, you will find descriptions such as "Littering includes the careless throwing away of waste in public spaces...".

If you rummage around in the environment on the way to the car or on a walk, littering quickly becomes a real nuisance and an environmental scourge with many facets.

Every morning on my short walk from the public parking lot where I park my car in the morning to the office, which is just 250 meters away, I find all kinds of things that have simply been thrown away. Unfortunately, the type and quantity of items I find suggest that most of the waste has simply been carelessly dropped. The examples range from the cigarette butts mentioned in another article to packaging waste, empty bottles, full dog waste bags and, currently increasingly, used nitrous oxide cartridges.

Personally, I have never understood how people can litter their own surroundings so carelessly. Especially in the aforementioned parking lot, you often get the impression that a clean car is more important to many than a clean environment. The contents of ashtrays, fast food packaging, empty used oil cans and much more can often be found in parking lots. But litter can also be found everywhere on walks through fields and forests.

Many people are obviously not aware of how long it takes for waste to decompose, although some of it never really disappears completely. Many things that are thrown into the environment today can continue to pollute nature for generations to come. Some things that were carelessly thrown into the bushes in a fraction of a second will take several hundred years to at least apparently decompose. Not only unsightly, but sometimes also toxic and therefore dangerous.

According to NABU reports, tobacco products contain up to 7,000 toxic chemicals that are released into the environment if you simply drop them. One cigarette filter is enough to end the lives of water fleas and fish in one liter of water. And the nicotine content of a single smoked cigarette can contaminate around 1000 liters of water.

Plastic waste is also a problem. It ends up in the environment in heaps. Once there, plastic takes a long time to decompose, with the Federal Environment Agency reporting that many plastics will probably never be fully degraded. If you take the yoghurt pot as an example, it takes up to 450 years for it to decompose as far as possible.

I am actually concerned about what remains of it at the end and what ends up back on our plates, for example through agriculture. Much of what is thrown away on land ends up in rivers, lakes and ultimately in our oceans. There it pollutes the water and a lot of waste becomes deadly traps for various creatures. Greenpeace has calculated that around one truckload of plastic waste enters our oceans every minute worldwide.

We have added a small overview of the rotting times of frequently discarded waste as a graphic for illustration purposes. The bottom line is that the result remains the same for most waste. Careless (and inconsiderate) littering usually only lasts a few seconds, whereas the impact on the environment is spread over many years.

On March 28 and 29, we will be tackling the waste that is already in our environment. This year's spring clean will once again see waste being collected across the city. Anyone who wants to can join waste collection teams on this day or set up a team themselves. And for all those who want to but are unable to do so on this day, the page Waste collection campaigns / Clean Offenbach | City of Offenbach am Main (opens in a new tab) provides a good overview of other planned campaigns.

You can also register your own waste collection campaigns on this page. Tongs, gloves and garbage bags are available free of charge from the resources and waste advisory service of the municipal utilities and from the Clean Offenbach staff unit.

And the environmental pollution caused by littering really doesn't have to be!!! There are well over 2,000 litter bins in Offenbach alone. And even if there isn't one nearby, you can take the waste to the nearest waste disposal station. In principle, it's no different than at home on the couch. Here, too, the empty bag of chips doesn't end up right next to the couch after a movie night, but you take the trip to the kitchen to dispose of the waste properly.

Our environment is nothing more than a big, green living room that we should keep clean together.