Two environmental scientists recently hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile route that spans from the United States-Mexico border to Canada, and conducted the largest known survey of litter on the trail to date, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The results of the survey were not encouraging.
The pair found significant amounts of bottle caps, gum wrappers, and rubber fragments as well as snack wrappers, used toilet paper, Band-Aids, cigarette butts, and bullet casings — the list goes on and on.
The litter extended to items that are biodegradable, such as sunflower seeds, orange peels, and peanut shells.
Though many hikers clearly believed that it's OK to discard any organic material on the trail, that is not the case. "It's kind of a misguided principle," Macy Gustavus, one of the scientists, said. "That stuff does not belong out there." She added that the amount of technically biodegradable litter drove her "absolutely insane."
By the end of their six-month journey, Gustavus and her partner, Tori McGruer, had collected (and mostly removed, though some were too large to transport) more than 1,000 pieces of trash. Extrapolating the data they collected, the pair estimated that there are around 200,000 pieces of trash on the trail at any given moment — roughly 75 pieces per mile, though that varied depending on how highly trafficked a particular area was.
Littering doesn't only spoil the fun for your fellow hikers, but it is also actively dangerous for the wild animals that live around the trail. Animals frequently end up eating trash, leading to choking, intestinal blockages, and death.
Access to nature and hiking trails is a great privilege — especially considering how much of our natural environment has already been destroyed by development and pollution. When we get to interact with nature, we should strive to leave the environment at least as good as we found it, if not better.
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