Was walking down the street the other day. Taking my Pfand to the shop to cash it in and go shopping. Broad day light, nice weather day after many ugly weather days so everyone is looking rather happy in general.
I pass by a local soccer club, lots of youths coming and going by bicycle, it must have been like 5 or 6 in the evening and it seems like one group just ended training and another is starting.
A sparkling white tesla drives up to the entrance of the club, while doing so: blocks the cycle path… was wondering why the kids had to be dropped off at the door with this nice weather.
Anyhow: car stops at the old clothes collection container, passenger gets out: it’s a fit young woman (driver is a young man), she walks to the trunk of the car, casually takes out bags of trash and puts them next to the “old clothes” container. It’s clearly not bags of old clothes, and she’s no putting it in the container but next to it. She takes out a broken vacuum cleaner: casually puts it behind the container, between the soccer club and a small parking lot and a park.
I tell her this is not the place for that and ask her if she can load it in to her car again. She acts like she’s from another planet and doesn’t understand me. She knows perfectly well. See the guilt in her face. She stays silent, rushes back to the car seat. They drive off, I give the middle finger and a “you’re a fucking wanker” sign. We meet again like 100 meters further where they have to stop for red traffic light. They try to ignore me and stare ahead, avoiding all eye contact. Not talking to eachother either. I don’t start yelling or hitting the car or whatever, because I didn’t wanna cause a scene at the youths/soccer club.
These were really very very “decent” and “normal” looking people. Young, wealthy, healthy, white, with a car. How hard is it to drive 4 minutes to the recycling plant at the edge of the city and dump your trash where it belongs for practically free?
“Normal” people who have dumped their trash where it doesn’t belong: WHY?
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Laziness or they don’t want to pay the fee at the recycling facility.
It is FREE to give old electronic devices at recycling plant. They drove into a little dead-end corner they thought was a “good dumping spot”. They had not from this city license plates. Chances are they researched a good spot on maps before driving there. It would have cost them not more effort to drive to the recycling plant and give the vacuum cleaner for free. The recycling plant is literally just a 4 minute drive away from where they dumped it.
Then it is laziness. Some people just have an aversion to second hand stuff and when something is ends it’s usefulness it must be trashed.
It’s free for broken electronics too! Trash it… where it belongs.
Well, they didn’t get to where they are now in life without some sacrifices (of other people’s time and money)!
Also you need to teach me the hand sign for “you’re a fucking wanker” I would very much like to use that more often.
you make a ring with your thumb + index finger and move up and down
When I was homeless I littered in the city. Being homeless around poor people is like being poor around billionaires. You have no pride in keeping their lands pristine. The upper class hits you with their cars, block crosswalks, talk shit about you, provide no accommodations. The upper class acts like it’s a fucking pain to help you and they attribute every little problem to your class.
But also, the city installs trash cans spaced 15-20 minutes apart, while allowing garbage piles to stay on corners for days or weeks.
I think it was probably the third or fourth time a poor person nearly hit me and reacted angrily like I fucked up for using a crosswalk at 6am, that I went from keeping trash in my pockets and thinking ones actions reflects on them, to throwing trash on the ground and denting cars when they narrowly avoided hitting me. (As an aside, it sucks when you kick their side mirror and it just folds instead of breaking.)
when you’re in this situation, i can try to understand, tho i luckily have never experienced this. It sucks and I hope you’re better now. But these people i’m ranting about were clearly by far not poor or homeless or socially or economically on the fringes of society, that’s the part I find very hard to understand.
I still have a tick where I rate the shelterability of nooks and crannies in public spaces. Dry stairwell here, unlocked gate there, and so on.
It’s an odd feeling, being a homeowner these many years later.
Of course they couldn’t trash it in the bin if they were driving in it
Absolute chad move by you btw.
Because the bin is full and if I don’t, I’ll be stuck with it for the next two weeks while the GF berates me over the smell.
As someone who used to work retail and in the restaurant industry, I feel bad, but the trash men always pick it up regardless and they get paid a hell of a lot more than I do, so my empathy can only extend so far.
They pick it up, but it takes a while, days or weeks depending on where you dump it. Meanwhile the trash in the streets attracts rodents and vermin. Old electronics end up in the environment, batteries can leak etc.
I get the smell part. I’ve “dumped” an opened empty can of fish sometimes, because SO can’t stand the smell of it so it can’t wait until trash pick-up day. I dumped it IN A TRASHBIN at a busstop, not randomly on the ground between houses, soccer clubs and parks… that’s just disgusting. The trashbin at a busstop is emptied very regularly and a lot less accessible to most rodents and vermin, yet a lot more accessible to trash collection service from the city. My inconvenience (bad smell) is so not enough to justify just dumping trash anywhere without any care at all.
As for the part “they get paid”: it costs a city a lot more to keep streets clean when everyone dumps everything everywhere, than to pay for arranged pick-ups. Everyone including you ends up paying the bill anyhow through taxes and/or less service from city in general because budget’s too tight.
I think one of the companies that picks up old clothes has gone bankrupt.
Don’t ask me, ask them.
I have an oil filled space heater that doesn’t work. It just runaway heats, trips the breaker, and tries to melt the outlet. The scrapyard will pay me maybe 50¢ for the metal, but I have to drain the oil and then I have to figure out how to properly dispose of that. I’ve thought about donating it to the side of the highway, but I can’t do something like that so it just lives in my living room, unplugged, broken, space-consuming, and ugly.
All that is to say sometimes people don’t know how to dispose of items correctly, especially if they’re foreigners from a country that sorts differently or not at all.
Stupidity. And being uninformed.
Maybe it’s a consequence of charging per bag for trash disposal.
While I don’t know anyone who has, I know quite a few who are get weird about being charged per bag for trash, so I can see that happening.
Wer ist wir?
I don’t live where you do but my apartment faces the dollar store’s bins. People dump all kinds of crazy shit here, I’ve seen mattresses, couches, but also just general garbage. I’m pretty sure because our shitty previous mayor privatized and monopolized the garbage pickup, people just don’t want to pay for it.
The bins also attract a lot of rummagers so it’s like a give and take. It’s pretty awful tbh.
Kids are more and more selfish and arrogant these days. That’s the sad truth. They want more and don’t want to work for any of it.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and chatter in the place of exercise.
- Socrates
