To ask if anyone will admit to littering?

[Icanttakethisanymore]

I am genuinely intrigued to see if anyone will admit to littering, on purpose. I was walking through the woods earlier and there was a starbucks cup and a few can discarded along my route. I am sure that occasionally people drop things by accident but undoubtedly some of it is intentional. I genuinely can't imagine chucking my rubbish on the floor so if anyone will admit to it, why do you do it?

i used to throw cigarette butts on the floor 😭
i haven’t smoked for 10 years now but I still feel guilty about it when I think back. There were occasional cigarette bins and when I saw them I’d use them but if not it went on the ground.
I was furious the other day when I saw a man driving down my road throw an empty can out of his car window - he had kids in the back ffs, what a lesson to teach them. I picked it up where it landed and disposed of it in recycling.
Does this make me a hypocrite because I have littered in the past? Probably.

Grapes and raisins can be fatal to dogs so please don't scatter them in public for the birds!!!!

he had kids in the back ffs

I think this has got to be the reason why lots of adults end up littering - if you're parents did it perhaps you just think it's fine??

"It's hard to describe the disregard it shows for where people - probably complete strangers - live."

Exactly this, @SerendipityJane

So hard for me to articulate but it's this really fundamental negligence. It's appalling. I still remember seeing a lad drop litter many years ago - he was only a couple of metres away from a bin, he had a really weird look on his face - like he wanted to piss people off.

All kinds of litter can kill birds and animals. Choking on plastic when they try to eat leftover food. Eating things that are toxic to them — or carrying these home to feed their young. Getting their head stuck when they’ve pushed their nose into a container. Getting tangled in netting. And many other death traps.

So many slow and painful deaths, in mortal fear. Caused by lazy antisocial humans, who don’t give it s moment’s thought.

That’s just gross though. Pigeons are as bad as rats when it comes to spreading disease. Two people died recently in a hospital in Glasgow from infection from pigeons.

I remember once around, fifty years ago, my mum took our neighbours' children, my brother and me for a picnic in our local woods. One of the neighbours' kids dropped a crisp packet (or something) on the ground. My mum immediately told her, "Pick that up; we don't drop litter!". Kid looked at Mum like she'd grown two heads. She clearly thought that dropping your rubbish on the ground was a perfectly normal thing to do. Sadly such ignorance has always been with us.

Nope. Never. In fact we do the opposite and pick litter up on our dog walks. We live in a rural spot which is popular with tourists who love to come on their "countryside walks" and leave their Costa / Starbucks cups on the canal and riverside paths. Also poo bags which the owners have kindly picked their dogs poo up in but then just left the full bag?!

If it doesn't grow in nature then don't chuck it in nature. It's such an easy rule.

Never. It's just awful, and shows complete disregard for the people who live around you. It's a unbelievably selfish thing to do. Once when my DD was about 3, we were at the park and I watched as a group of 4 teenage girls on the swings walked away from their cans and crisp packets. I asked if they were planning to pick up their rubbish. They were embarrassed but carried on walking off. My tiny DD and I started picking it all up and putting it into the Sainsbury's carrier bag they'd left blowing around. To their credit, two of them came back and apologised and took over. I hope that allow them thought about this when they got home, and felt ashamed, but maybe that's naive on my part....

Never. It's just awful, and shows complete disregard for the people who live around you. It's a unbelievably selfish thing to do. Once when my DD was about 3, we were at the park and I watched as a group of 4 teenage girls on the swings walked away from their cans and crisp packets. I asked if they were planning to pick up their rubbish. They were embarrassed but carried on walking off. My tiny DD and I started picking it all up and putting it into the Sainsbury's carrier bag they'd left blowing around. To their credit, two of them came back and apologised and took over. I hope that allow them thought about this when they got home, and felt ashamed, but maybe that's naive on my part....

I really cannot understand people who litter and have no respect for the environment or others around them, it’s such a selfish action.

Recently I was behind a car where a passenger was blowing his nose and flinging the tissues out of the car, I was enraged.

Seeing the amount of trash by the side of the road and on the hedgerows when they are cut back makes me think we are a country of people who just don’t care.

I’d quite like to catch the people who litter and set them to work clearing the detritus that they and their fellow scum bags leave around.

How did the infection spread to humans?

I think some people do it on purpose because it's a strike back against authority/rules. I once stood next to a woman who tore off her fast food packaging and just left it on the floor at Victoria station. I said "I think you've dropped something", which I thought was the least confrontational way of shaming her enough to put her rubbish in the bin and she looked at me like she was going to punch me. I didn't pursue that conversation any further...

It's even more sad that it's not just anti-social/violent types or teenagers if a Mumsnet poster admits to it 🙄

It is the easiest thing in the world to put litter in a bin or take it home and makes a massive difference to all of us. I never litter, it was absolutely drummed into me not to.

I’ve noticed the last month how bad it is in my area. Cans , wrappers, cups , food waste etc everywhere . My ds (teen) came home the other day got a bin bag and went and picked up a whole bags worth of rubbish from the pavements by our home. There aren’t enough bins in the area I think I’m going to have to try to do it occasionally too as we keep getting so much rubbish even blowing into our garden.

Pigeon droppings near an air filtration unit brought in the airborne infection.

Apple core/similar into an undergrowth is my limit, I don't know how people just walk away from cans/packages or pizza boxes (!!!!!!) or whatever, it's disgusting.

I think one big issue which has become apparent over the past couple of years since this message has been pushed is that most people won't adhere to the 'take your rubbish home if it doesn't fit in the available bins' line unfortunately.

People don't want to take rubbish home, and sometimes it won't be easy to do so (eg if something's open but only half-finished and liable to leak/spill ,such as picnic items) so I do seriously think places need to increase their bin capacity/emptying frequency in line with the number of visitors they can expect.

It's likely a rare occasion that a destination actually experiences a huge unexpected influx completely out of the blue - they know when they're likely to be busy and should manage bin capacity accordingly. That must be possible, but it's additional spend presumably so they don't want to do it.

it winds me up.We take our dog on a local country walk 3 miles long,one day it was a mess so I decided to get some bags and a grabber and clear it up.I got 4 bin bags full of rubbish (cans,cups,bottles,poo bags,crisp packets) once someone sees rubbish then it seems like others think oh it’s fine others do it.

it’s disgusting and they’d be the first to complain if someone dropped litter in their garden.

I can say with absolute honesty that I've never consciously littered in my life. I might have accidentally, like dropping a tissue when I've pulled something out my pocket, but never on purpose.

It's nice looking at old film footage of towns in the early twentieth century and earlier, as there's next to no litter and no spray paint graffiti. We look so less civilised than our ancestors.

I don't understand how people can not care about the aesthetics of littering etc. It makes everywhere look horribly scruffy and unloved.

I'm sure I will have done at some point in life, though don't remember any specific event, but certainly not now at 37.

It's extremely rare to catch infections from pigeons and even less likely when said pigeons are out in the vast open air.

To the person who left their pizza boxes in the bush .I'm the one who picked up 8 pizza boxes plus napkins and pots of garlic mayo at a local beauty spot recently because someone could carry them there full but couldn't be arsed to take them away.I was cross that day and every time I litterpick ,and your post made me cross again.

A character in a novel I read years ago said that the definition of middle-classness was someone who found it easier to imagine committing murder than littering.

But I think that's nonsense. I am WC and struggle to imagine a circumstance in which I would just drop something on the ground. It is ingrained in me like cleaning my teeth and thinking people who read Dan Brown novels have something wrong with them.

I'd also be interested to know how much of littering could be accounted for by something similar to what they say about 'panic buying', in that it's not a load of serial offenders but rather everyone else picking up slightly more than usual that causes the issues?

Could a lot of it be due to the accidental blowing away of a crisp packet/kitkat wrapper that has likely happened to all of us at some point adds up and there's a lot less serial litterers than we might assume? I'd like to think that, but not sure it's really true, although I can't say I've often seen people purposely littering (aside from cigarette butts).