Littering and PRO's

[Fly2High]

If this rant is possibly aimed in my direction, here's my response to you.

 

Where I come from, we find putting vegetable/plant matter into the bin to be 'wrong'. We use it for compost. Because we grow our own organic vegetables at home and we believe that sending plant material to a land fill site only for lazy people or people who have no family policy about recycling. Same with our separate bins at home for plastic and tins. We recycle.

 

Secondly, I was very specific about road tubes. I leave them in plain sight because I know the locals will take it away to be recycled for their own needs. Same with the second hand cycling kit and equipment I donate, or I give to my gardener because he's also a cyclist.

 

I come from a family of conservation activists. Some of us have been game rangers in our past lives, active sponsors of WWF, while I have a step daughter who has gone as far as becoming a Greenpeace activist. While other self important keyboard jockeys like to make a lot of noise about 'saving the environment' but never get off their arses to do anything about it, on weekends you might find me swimming out to the drum lines off the KZN south coast to cut the meat off the giant hooks that are aimed at killing sharks, or doing volunteer work at the Isimangaliso park in Zululand. A typical example of a holiday for me at varsity was being at our farm in the Timbavati during the drought of '94 loading hay bales all day onto the back of bakkies to try and save the starving animals.

 

Be very careful of making sweeping self-righteous assumptions about people. Because if I did the same to you, I might say something like, "you must be a real fatty to leave tyre prints behind on a tar road, or is that just the weight of the giant chip on your shoulder weighing you down?"

 

But then again, since I'm not one of those types, I wouldn't say something like that to you, would I....?

If you thought the view was aimed at you, wear the shoe. I still do not believe we have the right to leave anything behind after our rides. I also recycle, donate to bike bins, grow my own veggies, only plant indigeneous, but I have no right to discard a banana peel in a forest, or leave a spare tube on the side-walk. 

[Butterbean]

At last years 94.7 a girl in our bunch came pipe in the start chutes because someone had left a gel packet on the road. Front tyre caught it and slipped right out from under her. Man way to start your race.

 

Just keep it in your pocket. None of us are pros so deal with it!

[NixM]

Agreed. If you don't keep your road tubes after a flat (I don't - I treat tubes as consumables) then just leave them on the road side and they'll be snapped up by someone in no time. I often do repeats of the M19 climb up to Pinetown on a weekend morning, and more than once I've had to repair a flat and by the time I've come round again on my next repeat that tube has already been taken.

 

Gel packets stay in my pockets, banana peels into the bushes, and road tubes stay on the side of the road.

 

No, no, no, put the tube back in your pocket, take it home and put it on top of your bin on rubbish day. That way it has a chance of being recycled but no chance of ending up as litter!