What do you do? Yell "oi, you’ve dropped something, mate"? Pick it up for them and find a bin? Or step round it?
It’s the same when you’re in your car and the driver in front puts down the window and propels a cigarette butt towards the gutter.
Why do so many of us think our rubbish is somehow, miraculously, going to disappear once it leaves our hands? Littering shows serious disdain for the world we live in and reveals the indolent among us.
This attitude to dealing with our waste can be multiplied many thousands of times on a global scale.
Chuck that torn sack full of garbage by the river and nature will sort it out. Throw those plastic bottles and containers into the ocean - nobody will ever notice.
That’s unless you happen to sail through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vortex of trash in the North Pacific which is now three times the size of France. Or until wildlife get things stuck in their throats or round their necks, or microplastics make their way into food stocks and the human bloodstream.
Unfortunately, the wombles of Wimbledon Common don’t really exist. Even if they did, Orinoco, Tomsk and Wellington would have their work cut out making Great Uncle Bulgaria happy in today’s world.
Rubbish, and the conundrum of what to do with it, is on many people’s lips in Dunedin. While the proposed Smooth Hill landfill has been granted consent, the likely costs are making some nervous and prompting talk about alternative arrangements.
If it goes ahead, construction of Smooth Hill is still about four years off. That means the existing Green Island landfill will be required for some years yet.
In the meantime, the Dunedin City Council has applied to the Otago Regional Council to officially extend the landfill’s life, even while rubbish is still being dumped there. Unfortunately, it’s not as if locals can stop producing making garbage and throwing things out while we all wait for a decision.
Against the backdrop of this, the idea of "waste export" has shuffled back on to the agenda.
The council has already had a preliminary look into this as part of its study of whether another landfill might be necessary, but found a proposal to truck rubbish to a tip in Winton may not be economically feasible, could be environmentally unfriendly and damaging to the roads.
City councillors are expecting a report next month which will cover the options, including sending rubbish elsewhere.
At this stage, about $74 million of new funding has been earmarked for Smooth Hill’s development in the 2024-34 long-term plan, more than half the total new capital for waste management.
The term "waste export" has more than a sound of bureaucratic euphemism about it. But as undesirable as it might sound, perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to discount any robust proposals which might work on a regional basis.
Cr David Benson-Pope has valid ethical concerns about the "appropriate, if not offensive" practice of sending our rubbish to someone else to handle. Cr Steve Walker is also unhappy about giving control to others rather than dealing with it here.
The idea, however, finds favour with the South Coast Neighbourhood Society, which opposes the Smooth Hill development, as does the Saddle Hill Community Board.
It’s easy to say "as you might expect" or something similar, and to believe this is just a classic case of nimbyism.
But how much is it really a reflection of our attitude to waste to parcel it off down the road?
It would certainly be morally inappropriate to pay Third World countries to deal with our rubbish. The environmental and infrastructural costs of transporting it far from the South within New Zealand for disposal might also stick in the craw.
However, a solution on a regional scale might be less "out of sight, out of mind" and may have some merits which deserve investigating. After all, the Kate Valley Landfill near Waipara is a successful multi-council operation which processes waste from across Canterbury.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to trash the idea?
