Editor: Recently in the Outlook, I have read letters taking note of garbage along the highways, and those collecting it.
I too thank our local friends for taking the time to keep our valley clean (my workplace does an annual spring cleaning on the 1A). I would also like to write a note to drivers of pickup trucks who may not realize that they are a huge contributor to the problem.
It’s not often I see someone brazenly tossing garbage out their windows, but it’s almost daily that I follow a pickup truck with an open box containing garbage that gets sucked upwards by the vacuum effect behind the cab, and cast out into their slipstream.
In particular, after following a pickup onto the highway on a Sunday afternoon, you can watch a weekend’s worth of campsite garbage (plastic bags, Horton’s cups, beer cans, food wrappers) get left in their wake in just the first few miles.
Please, drivers, take the time to gather your loose trash and bag it.
This note will surely not change the behaviour of those who know what they’re doing and don’t care, but I’m hoping to reach some who might not have noticed or thought about it.
I’d also hope that the RCMP are writing tickets for this, since it happens right in front of their eyes when they set up their eastbound speed traps for city traffic heading home, and I’ve never seen a litterbug get lit up.
Neil Raynor,
Canmore
