Pick up after yourself, please

Come on, people, we can do better than this.
If you’re not a litter bug, this editorial isn’t intended for you. If you’re the type of person who throws down their trash wherever they are standing, then we are talking to you.
Last Wednesday morning, we opened our front door at the start of business, and we couldn’t tell if our front step was actually our front step or a front step at the old transfer station at Sander Sanitation. There was trash everywhere. Cigarette butts, beer bottles, candy bar wrappers. None of which needs to be thrown on the ground.
It would be easy to put this at the feet of our visitors who have come to town on their motorcycles, and to some extent, some of them may be responsible for it. But, this is a recurring thing. Our courtyard suffers much of the same fate. There is constantly trash being tossed on the ground there. We are sure some of it blew out of trash cans and ended up there. That happens. But people really need to have more respect for others’ property and land in general and stop the littering.
Littering, or what littering means to us today (think throwing a styrofoam cup out your car window), is actually a rather modern problem, according to texasdisposal.com. It wasn’t until the 1950s or so that manufacturers began producing a higher volume of litter-creating material, such as disposable products and packaging produced with materials such as plastic. That said, the impact of littering has been swift in those short few decades: about eight million tons of plastic waste finds its way into the oceans annually and litter continues to largely be a deliberate act.
It is estimated 19.9 percent of litter on land comes from unsecured items in the back of trucks or trash receptacles. That means the vast majority of littering is done intentionally. Why? Usually a lack of a nearby trash can, or worse yet, laziness or carelessness.
If you’re a litter bug, we want you to ask yourself a question. What if everybody did what you do? What if every single person just tossed their trash on the ground whenever they were done with it. What would the community look like? We would be up to our knees in trash everywhere we went. The reason that isn’t the case is that, thankfully, most people are conscientious.
 Littering isn’t just gross and unnecessary, it’s bad for the environment and it kills wildlife. There is absolutely zero benefit to littering, other than you didn’t have to walk 30 feet to find a trash bin.
Littering is not something grown adults should do. Put your cigarette butts and your trash in a designated receptacle. Let’s have some pride in our community and do the right thing. Nobody should have to clean trash piled up outside their front door every morning. Let’s pledge to do better.