I paid my banker a visit and, no surprise if I’m involved, the topic turned to litter.  It comes up as soon as I am asked what I do for a living.

“Mr. $” shared his observations from back in his native Mumbai.  Floods aren’t the real threat, he told me, but the garbage clogging drains. 

In fairness, we can’t blame the garbage. The real menace is the person who casts it into the street, sending it in search of a drain to plug.  I tell him that litter and garbage have been pegged as the cause of rapid increases in dengue fever in India. 

We share words about culture and its hand in shaping disrespectful waste-handling.   Not the average topic you raise with your investment adviser.  He calls in his manager. I guess it’s not run-of-the-mill for a client to arrive saying something completely different.  We shake hands and she introduces herself as the branch manager.  She points to the bus stop outside the window to my left where a human herd has been standing in wait for the full length of my 45-minute appointment.  A city all-purpose bin is steps away from the transit shelter in and around which the passengers congregate.

Bank parking lots are notorious locales for workers on break and lunch eating and sipping in their cars before or after doing their transactions inside the bank.  Smokers love to finish a smoke before entering a bank. They will flick it somewhere near the entrance.

I follow the direction of the manager’s outstretched finger as she unloads her beef about the state of chronic litter at the identified transit location.  “It’s disgusting,” she says. “Yes,” I empathize. “That is known as a ‘transition point’ in the litter prevention profession, a place where litter is likely to accumulate.”  But what I’m really thinking is this:

“Listen, lady.  Banks are some of the worst offenders when it comes to litter. You don’t have bins on your premises and you don’t have obvious recycling containers at your ATMs and in the branches.  Most bank properties are a mess and aren’t maintained regularly enough. What are you prepared to do about it?”

Every sign on the wall has something to do with financial services.  Okay, that stands to reason, it’s a bank.  But not one sign about recycling ATM receipts or keeping the area clean or using bins that should be provided. 

Banks have a stake in keeping their vicinity free of litter.  Judging from the most recent quarterly bank profits, financial institutions can well afford to be partners in litter education practices and programs.  Certainly they can do more than just point fingers.

(Excerpts from this editorial will appear in the Canadian Advertising Standards newsletter to advertisers.)

In this environmental age, portrayals of littering should be an absolute no-no in advertising.  Unfortunately, advertisers pay far less attention to the hot-button topic of litter than this multi-billion dollar global problem deserves. 

In fact, most advertising is unrealistically clean.  You won’t see roadside litter in a car commercial, plastic litter in a travel ad or trash bins in advertising for chewing gum.  There’s a disconnection between the product being promoted and the waste associated with it, unless you’re marketing garbage bags.

We see nymphs skipping down to the beach, portable lattes and smoothies in hand. Hikers in the forest clutch their disposable coffee cups and picnickers and fast food and beverage partakers enjoy their meals with never a recycling container in sight.

‘Recycling’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘zero waste’ are today’s popular corporate buzzwords.  Frankly, corporations fall down on their responsibility to address their product litter.  Sometimes they slip up.  The recent TV image of a disavowing smoker using a school stair instead of an ash receptacle to extinguish the cigarette butt inadvertently promotes littering. Plastic bottles strung along a beach sell us a water filter.  Animated lottery tickets for a prominent charity float from the sky, littering a winding highway below.  These images are gratuitous.

A particularly egregious example: the long-running Brita water filter commercial showing a trail of plastic bottles floating surf-side as far as the eye can see is a blatant extortion of littering as a means to corporate gain. It's as though Brita makers had never heard of beach litter and marine litter.  I believe that anytime littering is portrayed it should be accompanied by the right call to action with writing on the screen. 'Buy our product, please don't litter', for example. A universal litter prevention icon on every ad from producers, most of whom dodge, weave and contort, will do anything to steer clear of their products' litter problems.

Creative departments and agency leaders could do a world of good by screening ads to omit acts of littering.  Corporations who hire them would serve society well by flexing the power of their advertising muscle to drive a generic campaign around litter prevention.  

As the snow melts a well-worn sight is fully revealed.  Like a receding hairline looming in the mirror at a man contemplating a hair transplant, the baldness of human activity is found in the litter that winter’s yielding reveals.

The assumption that someone anytime soon, if at all, is going to run out and clean up the garbage is absurd. There it shall sit, or blow, or get soggy or entangle itself in a tree branch and stick out its tongue at everyone who passes.   I bet you didn’t know branded paper pizza trays, waxy cups and wet napkins had tongues.  I assure you, orange or red logos on soggy cardboard swimming in an ice puddle or wafting against a white drift are a mocking sight indeed.

Litter is a blight no question, and the people who demonstrate littering behaviors are blighters.  It is surprising, though, that many of them drive nice cars and live in clean homes.

I met with one of the big five litter generating product manufacturers recently and posed a question I always ask of big corporations.  “Do you specifically frown on littering as part of your corporate dialogue with employees concerning codes of conduct?”

‘Well,’ said the corporate director, ‘we expect anyone who works for us not to litter.’

That doesn’t work in marketing.  You don’t merely expect a potential customer to buy your product. You have to tell them.   Similarly, you cannot simply expect your employees to not litter.  You have to tell them. State the expectation and the consequence.  Statistics don’t lie. At least three in ten of your employees are litterers.  

And they’re messing up my street.

Watch the ground when a Tims contest comes to town.  If you’re Canadian you must know I’m talking about Tim Hortons, the national leader in coffees-to-go.  You will be very familiar with the chain’s Roll Up The Rim To Win contest.  It has returned with a vengeance. Tims has rolled out the ‘roll-up’ to mark its 50th anniversary.  From now until April, the popular marketing strategy is not only back, it’s bigger and better.  Bonus roll-ups, additional chances: even more reasons to Hoover up the Timmys.  So keep your eye to the ground. Popular coffee contest = more littered lids + cups.

I have talked to Tim Hortons brass about the litter problem.  The company expresses concern about the rate of littering in the takeaway coffee cup community (TCCC). Like most companies, however, they see littering among the TCCC as a behavioral problem, not a business issue for them. The company’s response to litter is muted, to say the least, but the issue makes officials wince in private. They don’t want their good corporate images suffering any splash back from an association with litter.  I don’t see how that can be helped when their branded litter is staring at us from the ground up. 

An executive at Tims relays a classic story.  It was September 2009, upon the repatriation of Tims’ corporate ownership back to its home roots in Canada from the US.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper, like most elected officials, never one to shy away from an opportunistic political play, arranged a tour stop at Hortons’ HQ for a rah-rah session.  He skipped a high level UN meeting in New York to visit Tims executives and self-credit  Conservative policies for the  company’s decision to transfer its corporate paperwork after being 15 years registered in Delaware. 

Harper was due to show up at the Oakville head office and protesters knew it.  They  would be dogging him at this particular campaign stop.  But first they would all meet at the franchised Tim Hortons outlet at the corner and grab some refreshments to go.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) showed up, angry about the seal hunt. Environmentalists - anyone with an axe to grind, their takeout coffees, bagged goodies in hand and placards - rallied in front of Tim Hortons’ Oakville nerve centre that day.  Even the PETA seal mascot had a large coffee in hand.  The ballyhoo was over soon enough without incident.  But at the end of it all corporate officials had to shake their heads when they saw all the packaging the protesters had left outside, littered about. 

I guess we know where the problem really lays, right people?  With people. Hockey dad Harper loves his Tims, but does he ever talk about litter? No, at least not to my knowledge.  Protesters, they love the planet, but do they respect the earth? Not in this story.

Back to the contest business for a moment, and the Hortons chain isn’t the only one that can be blamed for product litter (McDonald’s, are you reading this?) – coffee contest promoters have an obligation to recognize that their peel-off promotions  generate even more littered cups and lids, and let’s not forget stir sticks and creamers.  Roll up, sure folks, but not throw down.