Walking through Luxembourg’s country-side, one notices incredible amounts of litter everywhere along the streets and forests. Every couple of meters one finds empty plastic bottles or pieces of rubbish lying around. Remind you, Luxembourg is one of the richest countries in the world. If Luxembourg cannot handle its own waste and litter, how and why should one expect poorer countries to do otherwise? Also, how can we expect that our oceans are ever going to be free of plastic if we cannot even handle the litter on our own doorsteps?
Clearly, politicians in Luxembourg are doing way too little and surprisingly don’t seem to treat this as a serious problem. This is very annoying. But one cannot always point the finger at politicians. This is everyone’s problem. There does not seem to be a sufficiently strong social norm to reduce littering.
So here are simple rules, for some they may unfortunately be #ProvocativeThoughts, on litter:
- Don’t litter – your home is not only your house. You don’t litter in your house, so don’t litter in home, i.e. your community.
- If you don’t want that others litter in your area, then don’t litter in other people’s community.
- If you see someone littering, don’t be shy, tell them off!
- Most importantly: If everyone picks up a piece of litter every day, all communities will be clean.
We need more social norms such as point #4, so I will re-iterate on this again:
If everyone picks up a piece of litter every day, then our communities will be clean again. Start today!