Would you give up your drive-thru cup of coffee to avoid another ice storm or flood? Mayor Hazel McCallion is right on the bean with her suggestion that car idling bylaws start being enforced at drive-thru restaurant lanes.

In her parting year, the 93-year-old mayor of Mississauga, Ontario wanted to stir things up and have folks wake up and smell the coffee. If you must order from your driver’s seat, do it in three minutes, or turn off the ignition while you wait beyond the legal limit for idling. 

All this mass run-on at drive-throughs, not to mention at banks and driving schools, is a bad olive in the atmospheric cocktail. Our fumes fuel climate change, simple as that. We contribute more than enough exhaust in traffic jams and general travel. Why can’t people change in even a small way and give the drive-through a bypass? Some people exit their car but leave it running for extended periods on a smog day so a passenger can have air conditioning - I’ve seen that happen in my bank parking lot.

Hazel has hit on an important issue. Canada could ban drive-throughs outright and I would be happy. Unfortunately politicians come up against the wall of behavioral intransigence - a public unwilling to change its behavior, a public that believes the drive-through culture is normal and cherishes it like a human right. Never mind that there’s an obesity epidemic. A walk to the counter, we could all use the exercise.

The US report this week painted climate change as a clear and present danger. We are beings who would choke out our oxygen and propel climate disasters all for a hot coffee in a non-recyclable cup.

Clean air and climate stability, or a double-double to go? I think the choice is clear.

Hazel was right to zero in on bourgeois idling. She hinted at dishing out a $150 fine to idling drivers at drive-through line-ups. Too bad she was only joking.

Now, idling drivers, regarding those littered coffee cups and take-out bags . . . 

Today is the closest the world gets to a calendar date dedicated to people who litter.  April Fools' Day.  Only a fool would think it is okay to spread his or her legacy of loose waste on the planet.  Yet so many people do this.  They can be rich or broke, dressed in pinstripes or tatters, drive a luxury car or take the bus.  People who litter come in all shapes, sizes, incomes and backgrounds.  This is the same description that experts use when speaking about rapists, bullies, addicts and other abusers in the anti-social realm.

Mindless fools.  One remedy to littering could be found in mindfulness training.  Awareness really does open eyes.

But, since April Fools' is all about tricks and surprise endings, here’s news that fits the bill: a quit-smoking measure has backfired on Australia, a global zealot among nations bent on legislating smoking out of existence.  Underpinning the strategy was the country’s forerunning move in December 2012 to demand plain packaging for tobacco products – no more branding with fetchingly colourful logos and designs.  All cigarettes were mandated into identical, drab packaging.

The latest study proves to be a mockery of the entire idea that plain packages reduce smoking, and, tangentially, litter.  A recent report has debunked that premise by pointing out that smoking has increased with the advent of plain packs.

Figures released March 25 from AU tobacco companies show a rise in tobacco sales by 59 million cigarettes while black market ‘branded’ packs also flooded the market in the first year of plain packaging.  Funny, tobacco sales had been on a steady downward slide before 2009 and all the attendant publicity around the government's measure.  Under the new approach, black market sales climbed by 154 per cent, according to KPMG research.  All the more to be littered, so a blow to the environmental keep clean movements as well. 

More smuggled product is being seized by Australian Customs. Illegal tobacco seizures more than doubled to 200 million in 2012/13 from 82 million in 2010/11.

Figures from the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service show illegal tobacco seizures have more than doubled between 2010/11 and 2012/13 from 82 million cigarettes to 200 million.

Two separate university studies tried but were unable to link plain packaging to deterring smoking among youth 14-17.

I bet the tobacco companies wish they could recoup all the money they expended on fighting Australia’s plain packaging laws in the first place.  This April Fools' Day, Team Big Tobacco Australia is having the last laugh, if not the last cough.

And did I mention that G20 leaders have agreed to host a 2016 world summit on litter laws and solutions?  April Fools'!

See the news story that inspired this blog.

(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.  

Hear Sheila on the Gary Doyle Show 
AM570 Kitchener-Waterloo Radio
11:05 a.m. on Friday, February 7, 2014

Toronto litter prevention expert Sheila White is taking on big guns Pfizer and Young & Rubicam over a national television advertising campaign in Canada that portrays a woman littering.

White, founder of litterpreventionprogram.com, has complained to the giant Pfizer pharmaceutical company about its television commercial for nicotine replacement therapies, running until March in both English- and French-Canadian markets.

It features a female smoker returning to the high school where she first started smoking cigarettes. At the end, she stubs her cigarette butt on the steps of the school.  White wants that image of littering altered and replaced, or the ad substituted or pulled. Pfizer Canada says that’s not going to happen.

“Littering is unlawful in Canada and around the world,” White says. “This commercial showing a woman smoking on school property and leaves the impression that littering is acceptable. Towns and cities everywhere struggle with the butt litter problem.  Ads like this one contribute to the problem we face as educators trying to communicate that littering is wrong.”

White says creators of the ad at Young & Rubicam could easily have instructed the actor to extinguish the cigarette end in a pocket ashtray or street receptacle.  She is frustrated that the ad will continue to run without changes.

“We want the message to be, ‘if you can’t quit smoking at least quit littering’,” White said. “Litter is a huge environmental problem that deserves some respect and attention from big-moneyed advertisers."

Made of plastic, cigarette butts are a form of hazardous waste and a major pollutant that lawmakers the world over want to eradicate from the environment.

White wants advertisers, their agencies and regulators in Canada to consider littering as offensive under “unacceptable depictions and portrayals”, Section 14 of the code set by the Canadian Advertising Standards Council, a self-regulatory body.  Advertising shall not “undermine human dignity; or display obvious indifference to, or encourage, gratuitously and without merit, conduct or attitudes that offend the standards of public decency prevailing among a significant segment of the population,” Section 14(d) of the code states.

I have an open and shut case against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford that no one else is talking about.  It has nothing to do with crack, drug dealers, extortion, the lies, the cheating – I’m not talking about any of those offences. 

I found out all about Rob Ford in 2004 when I took a complaint to the city’s integrity commissioner about Ford, the then renegade councillor and resident council outcast, distinguishing myself as the first Torontonian to do so successfully.  I’ve watched Ford like an eagle scout ever since.

Toronto, I believe we have caught him cold committing a crime. Forget the video. Forget the chief of police. Forget the mayor’s criminal friend Mr. Lisi.  Erase all that, and you still have the surveillance notes and photos.  Within those notes contains the irrefutable record of wrongdoing.  An easy guilty plea, iron clad.  I’m quoting here from The Toronto Star:

“Police then followed Lisi to what the documents refer to as Weston Wood Park, now called Douglas Ford Park in honour of the mayor’s entrepreneur/politician father. Ford arrived at the park in his Escalade a few minutes later, after which the pair “met and made their way into a secluded area of the adjacent woods where they were obscured from surveillance efforts and stayed for approximately one hour,” according to the documents.  The two men emerged from the woods and drove away in their own cars. Police then went into the woods and located the area in the park where Lisi and Ford met, where they found a vodka bottle and a juice bottle, which they seized.”

So there you have it.  The Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, littered!  In a city park, no less! In Toronto the fine for littering is $365.  (Earlier in the stakeout the police had observed Ford using a street bin for other bottles and a bag of fast food waste.)

That the mayor has littered would fascinate green criminologists like UK Professor Nic Groombridge.  He would tell you that people who litter signal their potential to harbor deeper anti-social problems that can lead them further into crime.  In fact, Groombridge has determined that littering is the “gateway crime” just as marijuana has been described as the gateway drug on the road to, say, crack cocaine use.

From littering also comes graffiti, spitting, vandalism, decreasing property values and added costs to the taxpayer.  Littering often occurs away from public view.

So when I hear the mayor of Toronto sweating out an apology for us all in the sterility of a midtown radio station, I’d like him to own up and pay up on the littering part of this whole mess at least.  People who love clean cities need role models with the capacity to understand why setting an example is important, why not littering is important.

Then there’s the matter of his pissing in a public park ...

Let’s not go there.

We first featured Susan Coolen in Litterland #14.  A former resident of Montreal and her native Nova Scotia, Susan came to Kitchener and landed the coveted artist-in-residence position, an annual program that Kitchener was the first in Canada to establish.

(Pictured left, Susan shows us her collection in Kitchener, Ontario.)
 


You have the rest of October to see Susan Coolen’s eye-opening LITTER-ARTI exhibit in Kitchener, Ontario. 

Tucked away in an alcove on the ground floor of the King Street city hall edifice, across from the revenue department, a trove of trash turned treasures awaits.

Coolen is a scavenger artist, who not only creates works of art from litter, but  painstakingly sorts and catalogues all that she collects, identifying 50 different categories of litter for all to see.

Wall murals, chewing gum collages, sculpture, portfolios of photography and documentation of one artist’s fascinating voyage along life’s littered trail exposes all manner of tossed trash, abundant ear plugs being one of her most surprising finds.

Outside the gallery space, tree protection fences in the city’s amiable centre town bear the markings of Coolen’s creation.  Hubcaps, lighters, plastic utensils and PET bottles are transformed with nothing more than Coolen’s hand, some lights, glue and store-bought twist ties.   The art is not vandalized, although passersby frequently will help themselves to a lighter if it works, and Coolen fills in the gaps with replacements from her collection of found lighters on the day of my visit.

Trash to art projects have been launched to draw attention to littering, but I had to confess to Susan I have mixed feelings about them. Yes, I’m all for the reclamation, the re-use, the “nothing is wasted” framework that is the foundation for this art. 

But is it possible that trash art gives the common litterer another excuse to throw garbage on the ground?  This time the excuse would be “I’m doing something useful by providing art materials for trash artists.”

Susan laughs when I pose the question.

“The odd person would have that mindset but they would likely drop that litter anyway,” she said.

The whole point of her yearlong project has been to raise awareness and create an attitude shift, she explains.

“Everyone has been educated about litter,“ she says.

Our little stroll downtown convinces me that LITTER-ARTI has made a difference. The downtown is clean, not perfect but, Susan tells me, cleaner than before. Her funky sidewalk art pieces aren’t falling prey to vandals.  In Toronto they can’t even install ashtrays on the main street without half of them needing repair within the first three months. 

Coolen’s exhibit has fostered media buzz and civic pride while elevating litter up off the sidewalk and into the gallery of the Berlin Tower artspace. 

“People do what they can get away with and if they know someone is watching and making note of it and don’t approve of it I think they are less likely to do it.”

Before her tenure ends, the artist wants to challenge local high school students to a snowball effect project of tidiness to clean their littered parking lot and “redeem themselves as a group.” 

She will capture it all on film and in art and who knows, make them stars?  At the very least ward them away from littering in their teens when the behaviour can suddenly take hold.

I trust the subject of litter in Susan Coolen’s hands. This project would work well in any city.

For more information:  www.kitchener.ca/berlintowerartspace

My corner was hit by an ashtray dumper. Just one street over at the stop sign leading into my neighbourhood, someone thought it an ideal place to empty a messy pile of 80 butts on the road.  Ideal, because no one is likely to see you. It’s near a sewer grate. A perfect chute for rainwater washed cigarette toxins to enter the ecosystem.

Who does this kind of thing? Especially with all that is now known about the fragility of the planet?  Research is sparse, but thanks to studies funded by big tobacco companies we know quite a bit about the nature of the littering smoker.

Smokers do not like to see ashtray dumping any more than I do.  In fact they are appalled by the behavior of these ignorant smokers. Yet they wouldn't think twice about flicking a butt to the curb if an ashtray wasn't in sight. Smokers do not define that act as littering.  To them it's a legitimate means of disposal.  That’s just how it's done, so they think.

When they grind, stomp and mash a lit butt into the pavement or against the side of a building, flick it into a puddle, gulley or snow bank; they believe they are doing a good turn. They are preventing a fire.

Almost double the number of smokers litter than do not: 65/35 out of 100. They give a number of pat excuses for their tobacco littering. No point in repeating their excuses, far more interesting to peer behind the cop-outs to find the real reason why people litter, smokers with even greater proclivity.

Breaking science offers up a few clues. Two telling studies may help unlock the mystery and identify markers of a predisposition to littering.

Ph.D. biz whiz Andy Yap's work on power stances correlates one's physical space and body language to the tendency to break rules. A series of tests proved that one's cortisol and testosterone levels changed with the adoption of Yap's two sets of body configurations. In turn, feelings of power and entitlement grew within the subject’s mind when after sitting or standing in the classic “Type A” personality postures Yap's team developed. Occupying a vast space behind a big desk or in the big front seat of a vehicle, for example, Yap shows, increases the likelihood of that person speeding, pilfering from the office or cheating.

I contacted Andy Yap. He quickly wrote back to validate my hypothesis that his work can aptly be applied to littering.

Sheila, he says, “I think that the psychology of power does have some implications for littering. If littering works the same way as other corrupt and anti-social behaviors, then power would cause people to do whatever they want and disregard the rules and laws there are in place.

“Anything that creates this feeling of power, be it posture, actual rank, or simply recalling a time one felt powerful can create strong feelings of power.”


Also three separate studies, in New Zealand, US and England, are rewriting our understanding of what causes the unruly child as a result of looking into maternal smoking in pregnancy. They conclude mom’s prenatal smoking is related to "conduct disorders" in those children.  Team leader Gordon Harold, PhD, of the University of Leicester in England, reports their independent findings in JAMA Psychiatry 2013.  

What if we could predict and had early detection for litterers?  In my imaginary litter-less world, if your mom stupidly smoked during pregnancy, if you strut your power stances and the interior space around you is oversized, or if you lacked experiences with nature through environmental education, you’d automatically be rolled into the Litter Prevention Program regardless of your age.

Non-littering behaviors can be learned.