Trigger warnings: Old man agitation; get off the lawn vibe; shakin’ cane at the world; easy for you to say; privilege.
To the person that rolls down their car window at a stoplight and drops their entire to go food trash pile in the middle of the street: may your hell be full of Karens and CoComelon.
The world’s got a lot of problems and we all got our 99. But to claim there is true heart for the Town, we must show pride. The mess that we make, or don’t, is something we have control over. Start with the Oakland motto: Love Life and then live it in the space you occupy.
Why are we as nasty as we wanna be? Laziness? Don’t care? Sticking it to the man? Or the reality of destitution? The origin of our human animal behavior is not to be debated here. There is a cost of the mess we make and every individual is paying the price.
It might help to admit, no matter how fancy one may think they are, we’re all just dirty disgusting animals. We, the whole world, just got out of a pandemic that affected everyone. The death toll was in the millions, and the severity of the whole thing could’ve been significantly reduced if we just knew how to properly and consistently wash our hands. A year on lockdown versus washing our hands? It sounds like an easy choice, but even health care workers, like the rest of us, were happy to ride dirty.
Why are we as nasty as we wanna be? Laziness? Don’t care? Sticking it to the man? Or the reality of destitution? The origin of our human animal behavior is not to be debated here. There is a cost of the mess we make and every individual is paying the price.
Back to the litter at hand. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a candy wrapper, a blunt wrapper, your receipt that somehow missed your pocket, or your dog shit that you watched drop (or didn’t see it). People leave a trail of I don’t give a crap everywhere they go. Grounded in entitlement and/or cluelessness, if that was a $10 scratcher or the napkin with the bartender’s number from last night, it would be coveted more than the last paper plate at grandma’s birthday dinner.
The City of Oakland responded to over 30,000 requests to pick up trash in 2021, with over 3,000 illegal dumping service requests each month that same year, a record high for Oakland. The small business owners across Oakland in the industries of convenient stores and fast food (encompassing burger and barbecue restaurants, and food trucks) pay approximately $750,000 to the Excess Litter Fee program to pick up the litter their customers create. The tax is hitting those industries that have the highest percentage of immigrant ownership and are offering access to healthy grocery options in food deserts across Oakland.
Businesses across Oakland’s 11 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) pay additional fees to keep commercial streets clean, including tens of thousands of pounds of litter picked up each year, gum – and worse – off sidewalks, and dumping removal on top of what the City already does. Any fee puts pressure on a businesses’ bottom line and adds to the cost of goods sold. So customers end up paying more.
Oakland garbage bills are another example of the cost trashy behavior creates. The Waste Management contract renewal in 2015 saw garbage rates for the City and all private residents and businesses increase between 50 to 70 percent over the previous term. The City of Oakland’s contract with Waste Management is up for renewal in 2025. Money spent in this contract on the myriad of litter abatement programs and intake of dumping could be used in better ways.
Just imagine more free public events, money for the arts, the parks, more play space, a lower cost of living in general. So live the Love Life motto of Oakland and listen to JJ and his siblings on CoComelon
“The plastic goes in the plastic bin… The cardboard goes in the cardboard bin… The glass things go in the glass bin… The food scraps go in the compost bin…Sorting out trash is good for the earth… Let’s sort out all the trash!”
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