For this Petcore Column we are going to consider the “olden days” - a time long ago, a time when most of our PETPlanet readers were not born, a time remembered well by many of us in Petcore.
Eating in the street was frowned upon. You didn’t drop litter, you put the paper in your pocket until you found a litter bin, or you took it home for the dustbin.   Heavy glass bottles were returned to the shop for the deposit, or rinsed and left on the doorstep for a milkman to refill. The remaining empty glass containers and other household rubbish went into the dustbin, destined only for landfill. Plastics packaging didn’t exist.

Fast food outlets were almost unknown. Bakers sold bread and a small range of baked goods. Sandwiches, cakes and pies were mainly made at home. Butchers sold raw meat and little else. Greengrocers emptied loose fruit and vegetables directly from the scales pan into the outstretched shopping bag.  Carrying the shopping home was an arm-stretching task as very few households owned a car. Shopping for fresh produce was done on a daily basis, refrigerators were rare and food was kept in wire mesh “safes”, its best before date was only one day later and much food was thrown away. 
How different today. Packaging developments, especially the use of plastics packaging (derived from oil) has ensured that a wide range of raw and prepared foodstuffs is available 24 hrs a day, ready to eat, completely safe and at its peak of freshness. You can buy a lunchtime sandwich, a muffin, or a burger to take away. Has the number of litter bins increased since the “olden days” so that waste can be disposed of?
You see a smashed glass bottle on the pavement or a drink can rolls along the road, a smeared pizza box slides by - it’s what happens these days. Yet a plastic carrier bag, a polystyrene burger box or a PET bottle in the wrong place attracts calls for them to be banned or replaced by more “environmentally friendly/recyclable/biodegradable” glass, metal or cardboard. 
All of these containers have been dropped by someone. These people do not make a distinction between the materials, they just drop them on the ground instead of putting them in a litter bin (or a recycle bin, these days) or taking them home for disposal.
In the “olden days” we didn’t eat food in the streets and we didn’t drop litter. Now we do both .... except in Singapore where you drop litter at your peril.
In an earlier Column we mentioned the Plastiki, an ocean-going catamaran made from 12,500 2 litre PET bottles. Plastiki is crossing the Pacific Ocean to highlight the North Pacific Gyre, a large concentration of plastic debris the size of France and Spain combined. About 20% of this floating mass is rubbish from ships and harbours – buoys and fishing nets – but the rest is carrier bags, bottles, flip-flops, children’s toys, yoghurt pots, detritus of modern life. If this light weight plastic is not dumped directly, it is blown from littered streets and landfills and conveyed by rivers and drains to the sea or washed from littered beaches. How much of the heavy litter ie glass bottles, cans, supermarket trolleys, tyres and other carelessly discarded items is lying on river beds and the ocean floor unseen? Littering is a societal problem – it is the impact caused by a throw-away society.
What can be done? The obvious answer is to stop littering altogether but it is not easy, it needs huge amounts of political will. In the meantime those masters of land reclamation, the Dutch, think they have a solution to the ocean litter problem. The Dutch National Fund for Architecture is supporting a research project by a Dutch firm of architects to assess the potential for creating a habitable floating island covering 10,000 square kilometres in the Pacific Ocean, made from the floating debris to be found there. They will attempt to cleanse the oceans of a large volume of floating waste while at the same time creating a new land space.
What can we do as individuals?  We can encourage by example, make sure we all dispose of our rubbish responsibly, put it in a litter or recycle bin or take it home for safe disposal. Dropping litter must return to being a taboo.
In these days of conservation awareness litter must be properly collected and separated, it is a valuable feedstock. Collection can be stimulated either by punishment, as in the case of fines, or, preferably, by encouragement, for instance via deposit systems or reverse vending machines. We in Petcore believe that there should be rewards for enhancing collection methods that will maximise the re-use of the earth’s valuable resources.

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