I guess, like a lot of country roads, the one that connects our house to the highway is troubled by drive-by litterers. Or at least it has been since a certain fast-food ‘restaurant’ opened six miles down the road.

In our village, we’re lucky that a medal-deserving, 80-year-old hero walks up and down the road once a month filling a carrier bag with discarded fast-food packaging, losing lottery tickets, empty cigarette packets and confectionery wrappers  so that the rest of us don’t have to look at other peoples’ detritus everytime they leave the house. In the spirit of ‘doing my bit’, I thought I should take a turn this week. This is what I collected in the first 100yards:

One of the nice consequences of doing something mindless like picking up a mile’s worth of litter (5 carrier bags when I’d finished) is that it offers plenty of time to think about why people throw things out of their cars. I did it for long enough that I ended up with a whole Perception Map’s worth of thoughts. Here’s what happened when I plotted them out:

95% of the litter is the remains of what looks to me like ‘guilt’ purchases. People – mainly men, I’m guessing – that took a sneaky diversion to fast-food-sin-land on their way home and decided that the small feeling of guilt they felt when the threw the packaging out of the car window was lower than the guilt they would be made to experience if, instead, they did the ‘right’ thing and discarded of the litter when they got home. You can probably imagine the scene: he sneaks the Happy Meal debris into the bin, only to find that, even though he thought he’d buried it, the wife still finds it. And then confronts him with it. ‘I spend all day making you dinner, only to have you leave half of it… because, we now see, you’d already filled yourself up with crap before you got home’. Not that I’ve ever been in this situation myself.

According to the map, meanwhile, it is precidely this lesser-of-two-evils issue that sits at the core of my country road litter problem. So now I know what I want – no more litter – and what’s stopping me. I’m not the only person in the world with this contradiction. The Contradiction Matrix tells me that the most frequently used strategies others before me have used to resolve similar conflicts are:
Principle 9 – Prior Counter-Action
Principle 23 – Feedback
Principle 24 – Intermediary

I thought about these for a while. Then I made a phone call to a local farmer. One of his fields borders the road. He laughed. And now we have a plan…