It’s Halloween.  Remember this, something I read recently in a newspaper: “Everything we throw away comes back to haunt us in the future.”   I was reminded of when I looked out the window of a church recently and saw a white plastic bag floating across the graveyard, defying the otherwise pristine, restful setting.

Just thought I’d pass along a few tips from the Philippines about how to behave in a cemetery.  Some countries mark All Souls Day with festivals to honour the dead taking place in cemeteries.  Visitors leave the places in an absolute mess.

This Filipino Top Ten list could apply to any place in the world, whether a graveyard or a backyard.  For your ghoulish reading pleasure, here is the Philippines Top Ten List for All Souls Day in Cemeteries.

1. Choose clean-burning, lead-free candles that do not yield black fumes or soot. Set alight a limited number of candles to reduce heat and pollution.

2. Offer local fresh flowers, not plastic ones, or consider bringing potted plants and flowers instead.

3. Bring your own water jug to avoid purchasing bottled water. Discarded plastic bottles add up to the country’s garbage problem.

4. Go for waste-free meals. Use reusable carriers, containers, and utensils such as lunchboxes and thermos, cloth napkins and silverwares, and not throw-away bags, wraps, foil or Styrofoam, paper napkins, and forks and spoons.

5. Buy less or only as much as you can consume in terms of food and beverage to avoid spoilage or wastage. Bring bayong or other reusable bags.

6. Cut your waste size by buying products with the least amount of packaging and avoiding single-use plastics.

7. Don’t litter, dump or burn trash in the cemetery. Leave the resting place of your loved ones litter-free.

8. Put your discards into the recycling bins if available.

9. Relieve yourself only in the proper place where one should. Keep the urinal or toilet bowl clean as a courtesy to the next user.

10. Refrain from smoking in the cemetery.  

There are easy and practical things you can do to reduce the likelihood of waste being mismanaged and winding up as litter.

If you take a paper transfer slip for public transit and you find it in your pocket later, leave it there until you can get it into a Blue Box recycling container.

When you pack a lunch to eat away from home, take along a litterbag.  After, take anything leftover home or to the nearest bin.  It’s your stuff.  Pretend it’s your wallet.  You wouldn’t go somewhere and knowingly leave that behind.  Litter prevention is just as valuable.  And littering is against the law.

Say ‘no’ to a merchant’s receipt unless you need it for accounting purposes.  Ditto for ATM receipts.  A lot of this type of paper goes astray.  Leave excess packaging in the store for the vendor to recycle.  Hang onto plastic bags.  They have multiple uses.

When you pack your recycling and refuse containers, pack ‘em tight and right, and clean up accidental spills quickly after collection day.  If curbside trash contents become litter it’s usually because somebody didn’t follow the packing instructions for recycling.  Don’t be too quick to blame the truck driver!

Keep track of your plastic.  It never breaks down, flies with the wind into trees and streams, threatening wildlife populations.  Plastic can be recycled into useful materials, but not if it's in the water killing fish and birds.

If you smoke, change the way you deal with your cigarette ends so that every cigarette butt gets placed in a receptacle.  That may mean walking a block or two with an extinguished cigarette between your fingers.  But you’ve already had it in hand for the last five minutes, what’s a few more seconds?  In the world of littering, tossing or flicking cigarette butts is among the worst things a person can do.  Guys in trucks do this a lot, but pedestrians are no better.  Use an ashtray.  Duh.

If you deliver newspapers, are a publisher or distributor of handbills, make sure those pieces of paper are securely delivered to a location like a mailbox or behind the screen door where they won’t blow around.  Talk to your delivery people and create a reputation for caring about your product litter.

Wrap chewed gum from your mouth in the gum candy wrapper and deposit it in your pocket or litterbag until you can put it in the garbage.  Never on the sidewalks or under picnic tables, ple-e-e-e-e-ease!

Smokers are angry people.  I don’t say this with any mean spirit.  Their anger is perfectly understandable.

They were segregated, then banished, from all their favourite haunts.  The bars, the restaurants and cafés, the bingo halls that used to welcome them now spurned them in keeping with tougher smoking laws.  Smokers were booted outside, first to the entranceways and then further, to designated areas across the street.  In winter, huddling in alcoves and looking pained, smokers are among the angriest people around.

They are forced to look at ghastly, graphic images of diseased organs, bad teeth or penile dysfunction with every smoke.  They are targets for a bombardment of anti-smoking messages and campaigns from the public health community and disease associations.

With the ever-rising price of tobacco, smokers add mightily to the public purse in taxes and receive neither credit nor respect for their contribution.  In their eyes, the economy runs on their fumes.   As active daily consumers, they are avid supporters of small retail merchants and they keep the health care sector employed.

When anthropologists look back on the human’s long Tobacco Age they too will conclude that smokers were an angry people. 

They’re angry that they have this cruel habit overtaking them and over which they feel powerless.  Their nicotine addiction claws away at them and makes them antsy.  Maybe angry that they tried to quit again recently and failed.

Shunned, scorned, isolated and targeted, is it any wonder smokers present a particular challenge when asked to play nice with their cigarette butts and keep them off the ground?  If only we could appeal to the smoker’s better nature.

In the end, litter law enforcement and fines might be the only way to stop smokers from littering, but that will just make them angrier.  

Today Australia released its National Litter Index and kicked off a week of Keep Australia Beautiful efforts.

I have some pointed views on what governments could do to help prevent litter. 

They are not particularly drastic ideas.  In fact, they fit quite well with public programs that are already up and running.

Applying for a driver’s license, for example.  Here’s a perfect place to include litter prevention education and compliance as a condition of using a motor vehicle, the same as any other road rule.  Ditto for boating, fishing, camping permits and the like.

Litter prevention education ought to be included in the preparatory course for new citizens.  Municipal parks and facility permits should require users to clean up after their events or risk losing a "maintenance deposit."

Littering laws need to be upheld and enforced.  I like what they’re doing in Shimla, India: employing litter warden armed with whistles to whistle down litterers and ticket them if they can’t be shamed into putting their litter in the right bin.  (See the full story at Prevent Litter/Newsreel).

I propose a litter prevention school for anyone convicted of littering, running along the lines of the groundbreaking “john school” that was brought in for the procurers of prostitutes.  In that system, the convicted john attends a one-day educational session at his expense to learn the folly of his ways.   So, for convicted litterers I say, march them off to litter school and make them pay $500 to learn why they must never litter again. 

The accumulation of fees and fines would sustain the operation of the school and then some.  I have no idea what it costs to run a dedicated litter court, but no doubt a concerted attack on littering would reap more than enough dollars to implement such a system.

I don’t think these are radical ideas, but you tell me.  Send me your comments.

Is it totally off the wall to expect governments to do more than hand out plastic garbage bags to volunteers and encourage them to go clean up other people’s messes? 

As a society we have failed to make littering socially unacceptable.  We did it with smoking, unsafe sex and spitting, but haven’t stigmatized littering yet.  

After you say “don’t” to a toddler, inevitably, that young person will proceed to do whatever words followed your “don’t.”  For example, “Don’t stand on the chair.”  The fledgling child will stand on the chair.  You would be better to say, “Get down from the chair.”  Or, “Sit on the chair.”

The child doesn’t understand the negative concept as stated in the words “do not”.  The child understands a positive instruction followed, perhaps, by gentle assistance in achieving the desired outcome.  So too is this true about the person who litters, I’ve found.

“Don’t litter” is an ineffective message.   At the Litter Prevention Program we believe that positive sells.  We encourage people to do something good like respect the environment, use the proper bins, ‘think, look, place’, be clean – strong words that are far more easy to embrace than any negative, bordering on hostile, messages against littering like 'No. Don't'.

Consider the word ‘anti’ as in anti-litter campaigns.  Anti means against.  It rails in opposition and is not typically positive or proactive.  With litter prevention we want to do more than oppose it, we want it stopped.

With the right approach and ingredients littering can be stopped.  As with a young child, saying “don’t” to someone who litters isn’t the wisest approach.

An essential message is still missing from tobacco product packaging. 

While great emphasis is placed on the killer aspects of smoking, no attention at all is paid to the disposal of used tobacco products. 

Governments, the tobacco industry and users themselves have done a terrible job of addressing tobacco litter, which has grown into an identified worldwide environmental hazard.

There is no mandated message on cigarette packages concerning the correct disposal of this toxic product.   No one seems to want to talk about, let alone take responsibility for, cigarette butt litter. 

Why not require a “Do Not Litter” message on all tobacco product packaging and have programs that blend education with enforcement regarding smoking-related litter?

Tobacco companies net the profits.  The rest of us get the butt end.

The other day at my bank someone left a half-fill cup of coffee in a takeout cup on the ledge outside.  A few days ago at the supermarket, I was two freshly spewed pieces of chewing gum coagulating on the pavement.  It's rare to see it so fresh.  Usually it has mutated into a black tar circle that never goes away. Or it winds up on your shoe.  

Not a day goes by that I don't notice litter.  So I started this website and a program to teach people not to litter.  My goal for litterpreventionprogram.com is for it to be the "go to" site for information on littering around the world.  Litter problems and solutions, contests, innovations, campaigns, crackdowns, videos, photos, the continued tracking of this worldwide conundrum, the site is a ready-made resource for students, teachers, researchers and the public as well as a diary of this wasteful, trash-filled era.. 

The problem of littering has confounded human beings since the dawn of packaged goods.
How fortunate was I to stumble on a method that actually changes littering behaviors and attitudes!  It stands to reason that music and engagement are involved, as these elements are known to be effective motivators.  

Research shows that people who litter will only walk twelve steps with stuff in their hand before they litter it.  That's not only lazy, it's crazy! It's sad but true that in this age of over-packaging, some people seem addicted to throwing waste out the car window and leaving refuse behind. 

The Litter Prevention Program replaces bad habits with good habits and make people proud to be litter captains in their home, school, community and workplace.  Ahhhh - to feel good again.  Studies say that people who litter feel bad, that is, litterers have low self-esteem, which manifests itself in this particular anti-social behavior.  It's hard to believe, but they will feel better when they give up littering.