What is littering?

Good for the environment, except when it isn’t (Walpole Park, Ealing, 2025)

Walking a lot means you encounter a lot of litter. Encountering a lot of litter means you think about it a lot. In the same park as the bike above, volunteers devote considerable effort to clearing up rubbish each morning. Part of me felt obliged to join and help, but another part felt obliged not to help those that litter or to mask the wider issue.

When I lived in Taiwan, there was a small scandal on social media: a non-native, a British person I think, had thrown an apple core into a bush, which was considered disrespectful littering by an outsider. I felt it was trivial. My initial reaction was that an apple core was fine. It’s an organic material, unlike a plastic bottle, it’d just find its way ‘back into nature’, it’d break down and feed the soil.

But then again, Taiwan is very dense and as a result the small parks have more ownership per square foot. Where there is less public park to go around, what is there is much more heavily used, and thus more important. Even in the name 公园, ‘公’ is very much public or communal.

In England, there’s a definite sense that ‘nature can handle it’. This might be OK for the occasional apple core, but evidently people naturally get incredibly lenient with their definition of what nature can handle. If it can handle an apple, why can’t it handle cardboard or a chicken carcass? Then the idea that I’m feeding foxes triggers a red flag, so the same line is there.

In my late teens, the natural spaces around me were very stimulating. I’d make work using them, or with very slight interventions (like using organic felt & rope). I doubt anyone saw it, but maybe it was littering. What’s more interesting is that I’ve chosen to write about the habits of individuals, rather than a system that actively lets companies destroy the environment.