LOCALISED RUBBISH

Rubbish is collected in our residential area each Thursday morning. On most Thursday mornings, prior to the arrival of the rubbish truck to empty red bins, I do a short rubbish patrol with the plastic bucket and tongs, over a 300 or 400 meter section of our road.

Sometimes I go in the reverse direction and pick up rubbish along a more major thoroughfare.

The Northern Territory Correctional Services do periodic collections of litter from our area.

No matter when you go out collecting, there is always rubbish that’s accumulated. Corrections did a pick up along our street just three days ago. You might think there would be nothing for me to collect this morning. If that was the case, you would be wrong.

I picked up a significant amount of rubbish In just over half an hour, I picked up a bucketful of litter. The most common item of collection today were cigarette butts, obviously flying out of car windows. There were also three or four empty cigarette boxes. Always a perennial are plastic drink cups coming from takeaway establishments. McDonald’s seems to be the most popular “throwaway“ drink container. This morning I also landed a Weet-Bix box and one or two other cartons (flattened).

Bits of plastic, discarded potato chip bags, bottle tops, empty plastic bottles, bits of cardboard, occasional sheets of plastic, tissues, and similar assorted miscellaneous rubbish generally form part of my collection.

And that’s just in my immediate area. I would imagine that there must be many tons of litter part and parcel of the perennial make up of our landscape around Darwin, Palmerston and the nearby rural area.

What’s collected by those who go out collecting rubbish is just a drop in the ocean, when it comes to volume relieved from and environment and what remains to be collected.