EDITORIAL: Litter makes our community look uncaring

“Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.” - Mason Cooley

The average American produces more than four pounds of trash every day from packaging and envelopes to plastic silverware and Styrofoam plates, and apparently a lot of those people in our area drop that trash on the highway instead of in a proper receptacle.

Plastic bottles, aluminum cans, fast food packaging and other trash line the roadways and ditches. Large debris such as couches, mattresses, tires, broken tables and refrigerators sit on vacant lots alongside various unidentifiable plastic junk. The garbage piles up for weeks or months or longer.

Driving through Darlington County can be a depressing sight. When visitors come to our county, mounds of waste greet them.

What does that say about our community?

It says that we don’t care enough about our own neighborhoods to keep them tidy. When you don’t care about something, you don’t keep it clean and don’t pay it any attention, and that’s how our county looks to outsiders.

Appearances, while they can be deceiving, make first impressions, and, given the economic distress in which we find ourselves, do we want to give any visitors, whether tourists or potential new businesses, a reason to pass us by? Can we truly expect to attract good things with such littered streets?

Besides the potential loss of new industry and tourist dollars, the state spends millions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, to pick up behind us – something we could do ourselves without the government’s involvement.

Do we want to pay more taxes, so the state, city or county can hire more workers to collect the debris? How responsible do we want the government to be for our garbage? Can’t we do this without more government?

The cost of the trash extends further than just the sanitation department. Trash and debris can clog storm drains and cause flooding and property damage.

Some may say the yellow bags are partly to blame, but that logic simply doesn’t fly.

Residents have to buy some sort of bag to collect their trash unless they toss it on the ground. Having to buy a particular kind of bag doesn’t change that fact.

The money from those bags pays for the transport of the trash to Lee County Landfill, the production of the bags and the workers at each of the county’s 12 recycling stations.

You pay more, i.e. have to buy more bags, if you create more trash, which in turn increases the county’s cost to dispose of it. That’s it. Isn’t it logical and fair that those using a county service the most should pay the most for said service?

The original purpose of the yellow bags was to get county residents to recycle more and use fewer trash bags overall. Whether that program has been successful is debatable, but the trash remains on our roadways.

Yellow bags or not, we need to clean up after ourselves, encourage others to do the same and report those we see dumping.

Our community and our quality of life is our responsibility in the end. Each of us can do our part by picking up trash from the streets and ditches where we live or work.

If we don’t clean it up, who will?