More garbage insanity: collecting leaves and sending them to landfill

November 17, 2025 by Joshua
in Nature

In a decade of picking up litter daily I’ve seen about five other people picking up litter. I’ve seen many litter. Since buying packaged food supports what becomes litter, nearly everyone who buys packaged food or takeout, or shops online causes litter.

In the park, I see tons of people bring packaged food then act as if it wasn’t their fault when the wind blows their napkins away, they forget a cup or bottle when they leave, or some other way the cause litter.

Despite nearly no one picking up litter, someone in my neighborhood took it upon themselves to collect leaves, which are healthy for the environment and life in general, from the sidewalk, wrap them in plastic bags that otherwise wouldn’t have been used, and send them to a landfill.

Those bags contained only leaves, as far as I could tell. There’s litter on the ground next to the bags of leaves. No one picks it up, but they take time and energy to pick up leaves.

They could have just left them on the ground or they could have spent that effort collecting litter instead of leaves. They didn’t need to buy the bags, which funds creating future plastic.

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