Litter & Trash Costs Business $11.5 Billion A Year

I hate litter and have blogged on it many times. The thing I hate the most is the total lack of consideration or just plain laziness of people who litter because 85% of litter is deliberate, meaning it is preventable and the main reason why we have litter is because litterers don’t care about the environment. So even if they don’t care about the environment they should care about their taxpaying wallets and rising cost of goods.

Enough of my rant- Steve Spacek at American Litter Scorecard sent me this great article in the Boston Globe on Litter on the high cost of litter to business. So those who litter and don’t care about the environment or care where their taxpayer dollar are going cannot complain about rising costs of goods and services because the consumer (them)  pays for litter cleanup to the tune of $11.5 billion dollars per year broken down (do the math) it cost the consumer over $378 per year in goods and services/ per person in USA, not just taxpayers, coupled with other litter taxes- it starts to add up.

Here is an except of the Article:Lets Not Trash Our Roadways

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. Read the full article here