Pickup truck crash went unnoticed!
Fortunately, nobody got insured! The light blue truck actually lost both its front wheels before it ended up on the side of East Brimfield Road. If you drive on occasion along East Brimfield Road, you must have noticed the plastic toy pedal truck on the east side of the road opposite the capped former landfill of Holland.
“Keep America Beautiful ” research found most Americans litter, yet even more admit liking a clean environment. Littering is the easiest way to get rid of unwanted things; some taxpayers feel their littering is acceptable, assuming someone is paid to eventually clean litter up. A study is also arguing that littering is an unconsciously learned social activity passed down from generation to generation.
On some level, we all know that littering is not OK. In a parking lot of a CVS store I watched a female in her fifties dropping an empty cigarette package to the ground as she closed the door to her car. I went to pickup the empty cigarette package and knocked on her driver window. With the nice helpful comment, “You just lost something, ” I handed her the empty package through the window she lowered while I was talking to her. She took it with a friendly “thank You! ” She could have said, “no, I did not loose it, I dropped it to get rid of it! ”
If we care to keep our town clean, we need to dispose our garbage the proper way and pickup after others if necessary.
Litter invites more litter, this the finding of another study. In most towns Highway Departments pick up inappropriately dumped items along public ways. Since I learned that our Highway Department is too busy fulfilling their obligations while running a private corporation on the side, I decided to pickup the illegally dumped pedal car and other trash next to it myself and dispose of it the right way. I’m not alone; I have noticed Mary vandenBerg, member of the Conservation Commission, pick up trash floating on Hamilton Reservoir during her daily trips around the lake with her partner and their dog.
October 18, 2009, Peter Frei