[wkyle]

It's kind of interesting that state departments of transportations are so involved in anti-litter campaigns. Seems like they were the most relevant government stakeholders prior to the creation of the EPA. The Keep America Beautiful campaign was also involved with state DOTs [1], and many current anti-litter campaigns involve/are run by the local DOT (Tennessee [2], Mississippi [3] are two examples). I guess it makes sense when you consider the abundance of litter on highways, but trash certainly has environmental effects beyond the highway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful

[2] https://litter.mdot.ms.gov/

[3] https://nobodytrashestennessee.com/

[egypturnash]

People throwing trash out of their car windows was a major problem for a long time. It’d accumulate on the sides of the highways and look nasty and be a hazard to wildlife.

It’s gotten better over my lifetime but it’s not like cars come with a built in trash receptacle that you can get a standard bag size for to make dealing with it easy. That would be pretty nice.

[ghaff]

I'm sure it's nothing like it used to be but I still end up picking up way more discarded McDonald's cups and beer cans in front of my property than one would think would be the case in this day and age. (A fairly busy 2-lane road though I'm set pretty far back.)

[dylan604]

Why is this weird? The DoTs are the ones responsible for the roadways. They own the land where the majority of the litter is originating. And as you said, it easily migrates from there to waterways.