Let’s not trash our roadways

This of course rarely happens in real life, as evidenced by a Globe story reporting that only 61 people have been cited in Massachusetts for littering in the first four months of this year. Some individual commuters probably see 61 violations all by themselves in a week or two. State Police spokesman David Procopio told the Globe, “Littering is nothing we condone, but we want to keep our focus on erratic drivers who can cause harm to others.’’

It is impossible to disagree with the State Police on that one. So this is an excellent time to remind ourselves what each butt or burger wrapper costs us and what policing ourselves can do. Littering is something that, thankfully, most Americans truly get. According to a study last year by Keep America Beautiful, overall littering has decreased by 61 percent since 1969. Decades of public awareness and cleanup campaigns have led to massive declines in paper, metal, and glass trash.

By one measure, New England is a national leader against trashing our roadsides. Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire were all among the top 10 states in the 2008 American State Litter Scorecard for having relatively strong recycling and beverage container laws, anti-litter campaigns, and per-capita environmental spending.

That is no cause to relax. Plastic roadside trash has grown nationally 165 percent over the four decades. America has 300 million people now, as compared to 200 million in 1969. Today’s litter still costs businesses and government $11.5 billion a year to clean up. The whole nation is riveted by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with much debate as to how to punish BP, how much to blame President Obama, and our addiction to oil. Yet we Americans, bottle by bottle, bag by bag, butt by butt, cost ourselves the equivalent of a half-year’s worth of BP profits.

Tobacco products are the top small item thrown onto our roadways. Plastic bottles and paper make up two-thirds of trash four inches or larger. There are still 51 billion pieces of trash strewn on roadways and motorists account for 53 percent of it, with pedestrians contributing another 23 percent. In the absence of police pullovers for littering, the one concrete legislative thing we can do to reduce litter even more in Massachusetts is to expand the bottle bill.

For many years, environmental advocates and forward-thinking legislators have advocated expanding the 5-cent bottle deposit law. Currently meant for carbonated soda and beer, the time is well past due to include a host of other drinks. The Keep America Beautiful study says that while beer and soda still make up 55 percent of beverage container trash, nearly 10 percent of it is now water and sports drinks.

Despite all the “Don’t Litter’’ campaigns, Keep America Beautiful found that 8 of 10 acts of littering it observed in its study were “intentional’’ and that 85 percent of littering behaviors are done by individuals. Clearly much more education is needed. On one hand, Keep America Beautiful says that only 15 percent of Americans report littering in the past month in a telephone survey, compared to 50 percent in 1968. But when its study team interviewed people who had just littered, 35 percent denied having littered in the past month, seconds after they had just done so.

It may not seem as important as drunk driving or the oil spill in the Gulf, but every butt and bottle that flies out of a car is a tiny show of disrespect and a small environmental assault on our common space. Since the police are not coming, the siren against littering has to be in our heads.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.