Dispose of your trash properly
That’s better.
CHECK THIS OUT: Brian, Tricia and Brady Hurt were fishing in Northern Wisconsin when they spotted this bear with a plastic container over his head. After a few attempts they were able to remove the container and the bear made it back to shore!
Video courtesy of Hurt Family. pic.twitter.com/fLKVWdo2AC
— NBC15 News (@nbc15_madison) June 28, 2020
Aww. My favourite thing about that is how getting the bear on camera was not more important than actually helping the bear. So often, these “heart-warming animal rescue” videos show an animal in distress for much longer than necessary because people refuse to put their damn phones down to help.
The biggest problem is, even if you dispose of your trash properly, it still can get out there. Things blow off trash trucks all the time. Putting it properly into the appropriate receptacle is no guarantee it will actually stay out of the environment…though the chances are much better, of course.
And have you ever visited a landfill? I take my students every year. They claim they don’t get much blowing away, but it is so loose in there, and the high winds we get in the center of the country could easily lift light weight trash over their fences that are designed to catch the trash. The layer they put over it every night helps, but it doesn’t over everything (though I suppose it is supposed to, I always see rogue trash).
Using glass instead of plastic would help a lot, but we don’t like glass in the US. I was very impressed on my trips to Oxford and to Germany with the lack of plastic; when I got into London, though, they had quite a bit of plastic in the tourist areas, I suppose because visitors from the US expect it.