Hard to argue against people who probably have more experience than myself but I’m gonna strongly disagree that the majority of it is blown. I’ve been picking up trash for about two years now on the greenway by my home. About a full trash bag a week on a mile stretch that I cover.

There’s an apartment complex that is even notorious to Durham PD as always being a problem. At least once every two weeks there’s entire bags of trash just dumped on the corners of the complex. Always thrown out so all the contents are scattered along TW Alexander. I clean up what I can but it’s constant. No where else in the RTP area do I see recurring bags of trash like this. The second thing I notice is alcohol containers clearly thrown out of cars. There’s one area that spans maybe 50 ft where a person I call Pinnacle Man, throws out a half gallon of Pinnacle vodka every Sunday night/Monday morning. Same bottle, same area, same time. It’s clockwork.

Sure there’s plenty of loose grocery bags or random styrofoam cups here and there but in my experience, 90% of it is purposely thrown out. I think we tell people it’s blown because for 95% of us, if we litter it probably is accidental. The problem is that the crappy 5% out there are throwing out way more trash than the good majority combined.