Ready for a little good news? The Cliff Notes version is below. For the rest of the story, visit McClatchy.
Deliberate trash-tossing has fallen about 2 percent a year since the mid-'70s in communities where it's been measured.
On U.S. beaches, cigarette butts, beverage cans and Styrofoam peanuts for packaging are down, cleaners say. In most communities, pooper-scooper laws now make carefree strolls possible. Even along roadsides, more of what's visible today is grass.
Remarkably, the improvements come despite an increase of 90 million in the U.S. population since widespread trash surveying began in 1974.
Naw, it's worse than ever. We imprison more of our population than any other nation in the world and one of the things that prisoners are required to do while we pay $50,000 a year to house many minor drug offernders is to pickup trash. Stalin kept Siberia busy this way.
Posted by: Buck on January 24, 2008 9:00 PM