Can Scotland do it? Can this ambitious country get clean by 2014?

That is the standard laid down by the national government at a private summit in Edinburgh last week. Higher fines. More clean teams. Rigid enforcement. Education. The pillars are set for a nation set on ridding its land of litter in time for a bevy of tourism events in 2014, the Commonwealth Games, Ryder Cup and year-long Homecoming among them.

I must say Scotland is doing a lot of things right. A Summit on Litter might inspire other countries to do the same. Although a closed affair, the spotlight was right where it should be and litter interests, from Zero Waste Scotland, the National Trust, private businesses, invited agencies and politicians, were all there in a room dealing with it.

Where I live there exists a certain blindness of convenience, an unwillingness to fully admit to a litter problem. They don’t want to look at the behaviour because they are unsure of how to fix it. The real solution is outside their box.

Conference coordinator Catherine Wilson and her team deserve praise for pulling off such an effort in such a short period of time, five months. However, doubt about the effort’s success cloud what should be an optimistic time for everyone.

'Will their proposed measures work?' is the question some wondered aloud before the summit even closed.

To an extent the efforts are destined to succeed by virtue of the number of people committed to them. But if Scotland is seeking to change littering behaviours, there’s a missing link that represents a new approach to dealing with littering. This is what I am told we have discovered by linking litter themes to memorable, catchy interactive songs. Because what’s missing in all the strategies is the element of music and the power it delivers to motivate, to inspire, to remember. Indeed, our program has been described as the “secret weapon”.

The heavy stick of fines and enforcement comes from the school of last resort. Far more effective is to make someone laugh, make them relaxed and receptive, then make them mindful.

Littering is an act of mindlessness. Until authorities come to better understand this point, the cycle of littering may well continue, even after Scotland pretties itself for an estimated 250,000 visitors next year.  (Statistically, four in ten of them are prone to littering.)

While I was unable to participate in Scotland’s Litter Summit, I hold great hopes that one of the world’s more progressive countries will seek me out and look at what we’re doing. They need our 'weapon' in their toolbox.

They came from all over the Greater Toronto Area to celebrate Earth Hour.  Youth and elders, babies and rambunctious toddlers, they arrived in great numbers to show that Chinese Canadians support the environment.

If you want to get a job done, I would recommend none better than the organizers of the hour of darkness that drew so many participants from far and wide.  They could have stayed home and flicked off a few switches – the easy way to join the 152 countries of the world that mark the Hour on March 23.  But they didn’t do that.

Jenny Zhang is an incredible woman who seems to be able to conjure up crowds with little effort when, in fact, as any organizer knows, it takes months of work to plan.  Even then, a robust crowd is never assured.

The Chinese Canadians for the Environment (CCEA) committee and its youth contingent, “Green Ambassadors”, worked for two months to assemble this night’s hive of attendees for their Earth Hour Concert ‘Unplugged’.

Alex and I arrived to warm greetings and smiles.  Jane Xu, editor of greenlifeweekly.com, welcomes us at the door.  She is typical of the professional people who volunteer with CCEA to make an environmental difference.

At 8:30-ish, they dim the lights to a Cantonese countdown after tiny, single blue and red LED lights had been distributed into all waiting hands.

As the room went dark, a gasp, a thrill, one moment of awe as the coloured lights punctuate the near blackness save for the glow of our faintly lit stage.

The concert programme features a variety of Chinese performers, modern and traditional instruments and styles and is peppered with the talents of young people.   We’re up next. With the aid of a translator our act is explained and introduced.  The moment of truth – is this big Chinese crowd ready to have fun singing about not littering?

There was a palpable elevation of spirits and a total connection with the spectators: curiosity and delight. Yes, they were involved. Yes, they were enlivened.  And while English may not be their first language, or may not be spoken at all, they are happy, they participate and they understand and appreciate.

Apart from ‘gong hay fat choy’, I know two words of Chinese lingo – ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’.

There’s something uniquely special about the power of song and its ability to communicate messages.  Nothing was lost in translation.

TORONTO -- Apart from losing my digital recorder and running out of time on the clock, my presentation to Toronto’s works committee (PWIC) was productive and satisfying.

There are never many surprises at a committee meeting. So when I pulled out my camera and snapped a photo for this blog it broke the ice. The fact that my presentation led to political action was yet another surprise.

I already knew I wouldn’t have time to share everything I wanted the city councillors to know. With five minutes to speak, it didn’t help that 24 seconds had elapsed before someone told me to begin. I had three pages of notes. I didn’t make it past Page One, was just ready to dive into my best content when the red numbers said 5:00. But right up top I had asked them to do something to keep the issue going, tossing out the idea of a sub-committee or working group.

The thing about a committee is that after you speak you can answer questions, if any. Then you’re done. There were good questions for me, not as many as I had hoped. How I wished I could have helped the departmental manager with his answers and given him a briefing beforehand. On this side of the waste management equation, it was clear to me he’s not schooled in the research behind littering.

Two significant motions asking for more information about littering and tobacco litter control were introduced and approved. One, from Councillor Michael Layton, calls on staff to review a ban on butts - the kind you smoke - on beaches. He’s also toying with requiring bars and restaurants to install outdoor street ashtrays. (See my blog of 09/03/13, Little Restaurant Didn't Deserve This )

Councillor Shelley Carroll joined the discussion and spoke frankly about her former struggles as a littering smoker when habit and lack of an available ashtray dictated.

Councillor Janet Davis asked for a report on litter campaigns, education and awareness. This is something I can really get behind, obviously. It’s my field of expertise and it’s what I have wanted to see manifest for a long time.

My next goal is to have a hand in shaping whatever it is the City of Toronto officials decide to do because I know what works. They really don’t know. The tale will be told in the staff reports some months from now.
 
I can hardly wait.  In the meantime, I’m offering a $50 award to the 2,013th person who signs and returns the 2013 Litter Not Pledge found on this website.

Did you hear the one about the two young women who were smoking outside the mall? That’s because I haven’t told it yet.

The chartreuse sign on the refuse containers virtually screamed ‘No Smoking’.  A major Toronto shopping mall developer appears to be making a concerted effort to ban cigarette smoke and butts from their outdoor areas.

When I saw two young women lighting up steps away from the loudly coloured can at Entrance #7 I went over to them to survey their views.  

What do you do with your cigarette butts? I ask. “If there’s an ashtray we use it,” they reply.

I drew their attention to the sign and they acted as though they had missed it.

“Obviously there won’t be any ashtrays here,” I said, gesturing again to the cheery looking waste bin.  “So just to get this straight, if there’s no ashtray you will litter your butts ... “

Said one, as if to prove herself a more considerate litterer, “I flick them to the curb, toward the gulley.”

“Yes,” I said, “so they can go into our waterways and leach their toxins there.”

Before they could look too sheepish, I handed them a portable ashtray and introduced them to the idea of using (and reusing) it.  They thanked me.  I described how it is possible today to collect and redeem butts to do worthy things like restore someone’s eyesight.  By now they wanted me to go away.  I doused them with a few more litter facts before making my way to another smoker, assured that those two women would not litter this time.

Parmeet was having a quiet puff by the curb. He was standing on the roadway near where his vehicle was illegally parked.  He accepted my ashtray and seemed receptive to my doling of facts.  He took a flying guess when I asked how many butts are littered every year worldwide.  “I dunno.  A couple of million?” he ventures.

“Five trillion,” I say.  I rattle off the breakdown – 1,825 butts littered on average if a smoker does litter, 54,750 - a wheelbarrow full - over a lifetime.  Parmeet is astounded. 

Most smokers won’t mind if you calmly give them something to think about over their cigarette.  In my experience, they thank me for it.

I see that Home Depot stores are dropping their compact fluorescent light bulb recycling and, in Ontario and Quebec, have put the lid on paint recycling too. 

With the death of the Canadian penny February 4, an earlier announcement from Home caught my eye.  I had predicted we would see a shrewd retailer take advantage of the nation’s new round-up, round-down law by always rounding down to the customer’s benefit.  Sure enough, well-timed and precise, Home’s decision to round down the checkout price and let the buyer keep the few forsaken pennies as a reward garnered some nice headlines for the company.

Are the two moves by Home related? I’ll never know.  Certainly the company would need to find savings to finance the rounding down.  This is a corporation, after all, with shareholders looking for returns.  Home isn’t about to give those pennies away. Could it be that recycling was branded to be outside of Home’s core business interests and too costly to maintain in light of the penny round-down promotion, which one assumes will extend through to eternity?

What’s going to bring more people into my store – price, or a labour-intensive depot system for selected household hazardous waste items?  Will the latter produce larger light bulb and paint sales?  Can we afford to say 'goodbye'?  Before killing an environmental program it had backed for six years, no doubt these were the kinds of questions being bounced around Home Depot’s executive boardroom.  It’s not the kind of news that goes down well with green groups.

Fortunately, in Toronto, we have collection sites and annual events across the city for safely disposing light bulbs and other toxic products, such as used batteries, leftover paint, solvents, cosmetics and medications, to name a few.

Quite possibly the twin decisions Home Depot made – to round down the pennies and wind up the in-store CFL/paint recycling collection – are entirely unrelated.  Could it be from the bean counter’s view that for this retail hardware chain, helping customers recycle to lessen landfill and litter, no longer made ‘cents.’?

I’d like to see big box stores run campaigns inviting customers to unwrap their purchases prior to leaving the store. Then all this stuff can be recycled and the chance of product packaging littering parking lots, a common sight, is greatly reduced.

In Ontario, by law, large commercial and institutional entities are required to have on-site recycling containers for the various streams of waste.*  Customers purchasing from Home and other big boxers should take full advantage.  You’ve got the toaster – do you really need the box, plastic, twist ties and foam chips?  Let your friendly superstore handle them for you responsibly.  That’s a smart alternative to littering and dumping.

* Regulation 103, Environmental Protection Act, 1994

I feel for the small businesses that are forced to pander to their littering clients.  In my speeches to business groups I empathize with the difficult task a littering customer presents. You don’t want to say anything. That customer could very well walk away and never come back, potential ill will and lost shopping dollars hanging heavily over the merchant’s head. 

As I’ve noted in a previous post there’s a reluctance to talk to people about littering generally.  This hesitation is even more marked when consumers have all the power, and cranky consumers can be vicious.

Let me tell you about a little corner restaurant /bar trying to eke a living from its location in a suburban plaza near us.  Alex often talks to the guy hired to tidy the property. Today the topic is cigarette butts. The property manager says the restaurant really tries to control them only to have its efforts thwarted by vandals and drunks.

The heavy-duty ashtray the place purchased and installed outdoors for smokers' convenience, well, it wasn't nailed down. Persons unknown picked it up and hurled it through the restaurant window.

The property manager shakes his head. This is one of a half dozen locations he minds. He’s in charge of security, site cleanup and maintenance.  He tells Alex he’s one in a million to be having this discussion. Alex says he often compliments the guy for his attention to sweeping the outside of the place clean.

If we put ourselves in the shoes of the cleaner there’s nothing better you’d like to see than the site you worked so hard to clean staying that way, the containers those few steps away used religiously, cigarette butt litter not in impossible-to-reach cracks and crevices, but nowhere to be seen instead.  That’s the type of satisfaction I’d want to feel after a cleanup.  Not littering could be all it takes to make someone’s day.

And as the story about the smashed window suggests, alcohol, vandalism, littering, disorderly conduct, they’re all part of the same anti-social family.  If you litter, what else do you do? 

This week Associated Press ran a story that made me think two wrongs do make a right at times.  A guy, 19, in Albany is busted for littering from his car. Then police arrest him for having an illegal handgun, a loaded .356 that he cast off in the ensuing chase. Talk about a two-time loser. Littering is an anti-social act.

I have a new friend named Vince L.

He knows me only through my connection to litter prevention and this website.  I have no idea where he lives or works, what he looks like or what his occupation is.  The glimpses I have of him are through the words he writes in an email.  Happily married, a smoker (beats himself up about it) and generally quite a private person, he credits his wife and Singapore for changing him from being a litterer to litter-aware.  He no longer flicks butts.

A vacation to beautiful Singapore in September 2012 opened his eyes.  Regular scanners of our online News Reel know that this nation of three million ranks high for cleanliness standards and low on litter.

A friend will take the time encourage and help you along the way.  That’s what Vince did for me, someone he barely knows.

Upon returning from his Singaporean sojourn, Vince stumbled across an article by Christina Blizzard (Nov. 22) in The Toronto Sun about littering, quoting me.  He wrote wanting us to know we were both on the right track in our efforts to educate: she, through her meticulous journalism and I with an innovative program that changes littering behaviors.

He tells us, “I no longer discard cigarettes on our streets and sidewalks, nor do I discard gum. But it took a trip to Singapore and the words of my wife to make me change :)

“We need to change our thinking and actions before this city loses its high ratings. Torontonians live in a illusion that our city is clean and do not realize that on the clean scale, we are not as clean as they like to think.”

Vince then described how the government of Singapore addresses two big litter scourges: cigarettes and chewing gum.

Cigarette Butts

• If you are seen by a policeman throwing a cigarette anywhere other than in a city provided ashtray, you will be fined.
  
• City ashtrays are designed to be appealing to the eye, no cigarette butts can be seen, and the design also eliminates trailing odors.
  
• Most impressive is the people of Singapore love the city, and they will stare down anyone that litters the streets or sidewalks. You will feel uncomfortable (and that is how it should be)
  

Chewing Gum

• Singapore has banned chewing gum simply because people tend to spit them out on the streets and sidewalk.
  
• The city has been cleaned of all gum stains.  Both roads and sidewalks are spotless. While this may seem drastic, as we should be free to chew gum if we want, it was the only way to invest in a clean city.
  

Vince suggests that Toronto dwellers should be polled to see what is more important to them: chewing on a piece of gum or restoring a clean city. He wants to see more articles in the media about littering.  And he proves that attuning one’s litter awareness radar to trigger an attitude shift is possible and painless.

His closing line made my day, a simple,
“Thanks, Sheila, for your crusading work with your program www.litterpreventionprogram.com .” 

Sure is nice to feel appreciated.