A good friend of ours is visiting us from India and we are taking her around and showing the typical attractions of Austin and its surrounding. A curious incident happened during one of these outings.
Here is how it unfolded, my friend was eating a chocolate in the moving car and suddenly she opened the window and asked me “what will happen if I throw the chocolate wrapper out now?”, as typically expected I reacted saying the usual of “you are not supposed to litter and they may fine you if caught and so on”, she replied back “this is a long stretch of open highway, I don’t see anybody around and haven’t seen a single cop for miles together, so when will they find out and when will they fine me?”.
This made me ponder a bit, it cannot always be the fear of punishment that prevents us from littering on the road (it is to an extent an important factor, no doubt), then what is it?. Are the roads and premises so clean that we don’t feel like littering? Or, Our greater sense of civic duty prevents us from littering? or a combination of everything above. I am not convinced that I have stumbled on a clear answer yet.
Apart from the highway littering, the littering on the walkways is considerably less in this country than in India or other developing countries (I wouldn’t say it is zero here for I have seen cigarette butts being thrown without hesitation in this country also). This I attribute to a few reasons, one is lower population or lesser population density, second higher frequency of good, well kept trash cans and lastly less number of mom and pop stores selling items in loose (1 cigarette, 1 chocolate and so on).
The last reason is the one that is making me think twice and thrice, is reducing the number of independent stores and replacing it with a super market kind of thing can make things cleaner and better for the environment in some sense?
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