Coastal Litter

It does always annoy me to see litter on the trail when hiking. It speaks to a lack of care and concern that actually sort of mystifies me -- it just makes no sense to go to all that effort to enjoy a relatively pristine environment, and then leave it visibly less pristine. But as far as I know, that litter causes relatively little damage to the flora and fauna of the ecosystem. So my sense of annoyance and befuddlement are generally about equal.

It wasn't until I lived in a coastal community that I began to be truly angered by litter. It is estimated that marine littler reduces the value of global marine ecosystem services by $500 to $2500 billion annually, or 1 to 5% of total value [see "Global ecological, social and economic impacts of marine plastic"]. Knowing this, seeing our shoreline littered with single-use water bottles, disposable shopping bags, surgical gloves, face masks, containers from take-out meals, and so on -- well, it just infuriates me. We know where all this litter comes from, and we cannot lay all the blame at the feet of governments and big business.

I do think some public shaming is in order on this one. Maybe not $1000 littering penalties which seem unlikely to be assessed, and seem grossly unfair... I think the general idea that behavior is most readily modified by proportionate and reliable penalties applies here. But realistically, catching non-compliant people is hard to do reliably. A little bit of moral shaming does not seem unwarranted as well. 

Still, if it is hard to catch people in the act, I wonder if there are other incentives that could apply. I did see an initial reduction in cans and bottles as litter when bottle bills were passed here in Massachusetts. However, the value of the deposit has not changed with inflation and there are many classes of container that logically should be included, yet are not. So that dial seems to be creeping back. We should revisit and strengthen the bottle bill, IMHO.

But that only part of our litter problem. Could we offer incentives that are hard to manipulate for cleaning up seaside rubbish? Could we somehow gamify trash pickup to create incentives to remove this trash from our coastal ecosystems? As they say, losing trillion dollars or marine services here, and a trillion dollars there, and all the sudden you're talking about real money.