Littering is more than just a piece of trash you throw out your car window, or drop while walking down the side of the street. It tumbles into something more, something bigger. Pollution is a huge problem, and our littering ties into that.
Trash left on the sides of roads can cause accidents. It also becomes a huge breeding ground for insects and rodents. Some trash can be very flammable, causing immediate fires on the side of highways/roads. Other than that animals can get into it, confusing it as food, and trying to eat it. Every year millions of animals die just from mistaking our garbage as something they can eat. Especially in the ocean when fish get trapped in strings of plastic or accidentally consume the garbage floating around in their homes, it ends up making their bodies shut down. Most don’t think about all the little things and events that can be caused by that little action of leaving your garbage somewhere it’s not supposed to be.
In the moment it’s easy to just throw something out, but in the long run it causes problems, hurts animals, and hurts our mother earth. The planet gets seriously affected by the trash we create, just to leave everywhere. Our littering leads to pollution in our waters, soil, and air. There are hundreds of thousands of dump sites for our garbage, acres and acres of land covered with garbage. Hundreds and hundreds of feet of just garbage.
Landfills are basically just a place for us to keep our trash hidden away where we can’t see, to hide the problem. It’s moving our litter to a new location, it’s still litter just in a different place with a bigger quantity. Landfills are very bad for the environment, they shouldn’t be something we can just forget is there. We bury all this garbage into our soil then keep piling onto it, or leave huge piles of it in our ocean waters.
All of our trash not being disposed of properly has affected us and will keep affecting us and the planet. As a society we don’t realize how big of a problem this is for our environment and all the creatures that die because of this.