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 . . . 

Your editorial (April 24) about cleanups missed an opportunity to educate people about littering.  As so often happens Earth Day’s focus is on the marvelous volunteers who tidy other people’s messes.  I was pleased to see a letter on litter in The Scarborough Mirror recently, but was disappointed that your editorial and your paper in general do not give the litter problem its due.  Cleanups are like food banks.  With each, we need to solve the core problem to eliminate their necessity. 

We generally see very little emphasis on changing the behaviour of littering, an act, which, besides being against the law, is anti-social and disrespectful to the environment we all share. 

Littering is a costly and vile act that I don’t want to see society tolerate.  Most people do not litter. For many it is a pet peeve.

Fifty-five per cent of all littering is deliberate.  The remainder is a result of poor housekeeping and carelessness – people who pack their bins to overflowing and are sloppy with their recycling procedures, truckers who don’t secure their cargo, newspaper and flyer delivery people who hurl instead of tuck or wrap, companies and property owners that fail to keep their frontages clean. 

There is much to discuss when it comes to litter and littering, how it harms wildlife, lowers property values, turns off tourism, ratchets down quality of life, breeds crime, drains tax dollars, leaves the environment poorer. 

Scarborough is home to the internationally recognized website www.litterpreventionprogram.com and a fun and effective educational program dedicated to reducing the overall rate of littering.  You have to talk conversationally about litter and speak to litterers to have a hope of improvement. Our free weekly newsletter, This Week In “Litterland”, gives people something to talk about. 

I would like people to know about and use these resources.

Hon. James Bradley
Minister of the Environment
Province of Ontario

Dear Minister Bradley,

As an elected representative, you know people are generally concerned about littering.  I am writing ahead of Earth Day 2014 to revisit an issue I tried unsuccessfully to advance using the Environmental Bill of Rights in November 2012. 
 
My Litter Prevention Program is again reaching out to you to encourage you to take a ‘hands-on’ interest in having a conversation about reducing litter. This goes beyond the cleanup and into the stream of innovation, education, awareness building and behavioural change, in which I am a specialist and acknowledged expert.
 
A City of Toronto staff report has proposed a role for the province in permitting levies to be increased on the price of cigarettes to help the municipality pay for cleanup of cigarette butts and preventive education and promotion of anti-littering specifically concerning tobacco products.  No doubt your ministry will be hearing a repeating refrain from municipalities calling for more assistance provincially for litter reduction efforts, each with its own scheme for raising the revenue.
 
Although, surprisingly, your ministry does not track the topic of litter, it is an emerging concern worldwide.  For example, there will be annual European conferences on litter beginning in May of this year.
 
Again, I request that your ministry pull together a forum where realistic solutions to littering can be brought forward and dealt with as a public collective.  Participants might include representation from Ontario municipalities, school boards, environmental groups, product stewards, tourism, business and the general public.
 
May I please have your ear to talk about this, or receive a call from one of your aides in this regard?  I enclose relevant background materials as links below. I can be reached at 416-321-0633 or via reply email, words@rogers.com.  Thank you.
 
Sincerely,
 
 
Sheila White
Founder, Litter Prevention Program
Publisher, This Week In Litterland 

Our First Annual Progress Report

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.

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.

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.

Litter often gets no respect. How encouraging it was to see Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson bring littering to the forefront in his state of the city address last week. Contrast this to Toronto’s mayor --  you know, the guy observed by police to have littered a public park with juice cartons and a liquor bottle, the guy soon to be known as the mayor formerly known as Rob Ford.

Jim Watson, who ushered in an interesting bin experiment on central Elgin Street this year, expresses fatigue over the sight of litter and poor recycling habits. (The two are interlinked.)  In his speech he called on compatriots to improve their recycling practices and pledged more bins and innovation to reduce the rate of littering.

Watson, in my view, proves that no mayor who litters should be mayor.  Real leadership starts with who we are at the core.  A person with littering at his core travels an anti-social path of behaviours that could escalate, according to experts who study anti-social crimes and make a link between littering and other forms of deviance.

Two high profile cases of late – one being Mr. Ford’s, and the other, the metamorphosis of Justin Bieber, who has grown from spewing his spit mucous over an upscale Toronto hotel balcony earlier this year to egging houses, public street racing and impairment in the past few months.

For Ford, on the other hand, his “gateway crime” of littering is an indicator of his love of underbelly associations with fellow crack cocaine users and dealers and his unyielding passion for alcoholic beverages, including whilst driving.

If you litter your city, you can’t be the face for clean-ups.  You don’t belong in the staged photo-ops, where you put down your work gloves as soon as the cameras leave.  You can’t speak intelligently about littering because, clearly, you don’t get it if you are wanton with your discarded waste.  You can’t be trusted as a lawmaker. 

Littering is the lowest rung on a long ladder of criminality.  Ottawa’s Jim Watson understands this and will focus his attention on it, he says.  By contrast, Ford stumbles along blindly, carelessly littering beautiful Toronto as he goes, stupefied.

Imagine $30 million a year going into a litter prevention campaign in Ontario.  Pie in the sky? Not if Canada’s beverage industry has anything to say about it. And it turns out industry has quite a lot to say, committing to seize more of its product packaging out of the hands of litterbugs and the jaws of landfill sites. The Canadian Beverage Container Recycling Association (CBCRA) is out to reclaim its used drink cans, bottles and boxes and is ready to put up to 30 million bucks annually into promoting avid recycling away from home.

The people of Ontario are being challenged to accept that they need to do a much better job of placing beverage containers in bins where they can be recaptured, resold and reused.  It’s the perfect circle. The only knot in the flow is the human reluctance to consider alternatives to littering when faced with the inconvenience of having to hold on to an empty container for more than a few moments.  So the beverage industry wants to pay to put bins everywhere and build a whole new wave of green businesses in the process.  It might cost a penny or so more at the register for your beverage of choice. In Manitoba the container recycling fee (CRF) is two cents.

Promotion and education figure prominently in the plan being advanced by CBCRA at Waste Diversion Ontario, the agency responsible for approving industry plans for waste management stewardship and sustainability.  If you missed the first WDO webinar from CBCRA, it will be repeated on Nov 7 from 1:30 to 3:30.  www.vvctv.ca/wdo/20131107/  Password: wdo1

Well worth it to tune in for a good two-way exchange on a plan that will send your beverage containers into the recycling stream instead of having them languish on the ground, beach or road looking ugly.   

CBCRA has stepped forward with a bold vision for diverting 75 per cent of its containers from landfill five years in.  Let your imagination fly once again to the possibility of three-quarter fewer beverage bottles being lifted from litter’s potentially endless stream.

Generally, people commenting via the Oct 28 webinar, www.vvctv.ca/wdo/20131028/ had questions about holding industry to its promise, accountability, the calculation and management of the CRF, contamination (i.e. human error), impact on municipalities and the residential blue box program, and, of course, I raised litter.

On all these categories – plus, plus, plus marks for industry.  The hints of criticism I heard from webinar comment quarters yesterday were muted to say the least.

CBCRA has the right idea and has my unqualified support. Does it have yours?

Manitoba’s already doing it. Help bring Recycle Everywhere to Ontario. Contact wdostakeholdercommunications@wdo.ca to voice support. Or phone Mary Cummins at at marycummins@wdo.ca, or 416-226-5113, ext. 232

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