Don't blame other people for your own bad behavior.
1: https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/things-to-do/cafes-and-...
When my brother and I were young, my parents used to pay us 5 cents for every piece of rubbish we picked up on bushwalks. We got a few dollars to buy the things they would have invariably bought for us anyway, and the walking tracks became, for at least an hour or so, free from garbage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3gK-X32cy8
He started in 2020 and the video summary was made in 2021.
If every person picked up a piece of litter a day, the world would be exceptionally cleaner quite quickly.
I make a point to pick up any I see; you can carry dog waste bags if you're scared to touch things.
Back when I first started doing these clean-up projects, I started by just picking up litter that was in my own neighborhood. (Because that was where I lived, and because I had never been to a lot of the other neighborhoods in my area.) But I found that the more that I did this kind of work, the more that I wanted to do it, and I eventually found myself going beyond my own neighborhood and into neighborhoods that I had never been to before. (Including the ones that I had always heard were "bad neighborhoods".)
Then to make things more interesting, I started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new that I had never been to before whenever I picked up litter. And after going through a big stack of monthly bus passes, and walking down just about every street in the city (and doing it alone and without a phone) I want to say that not only has nothing bad ever happened to me, but I've encountered a lot of strangers who were almost "too nice" to me...
Because these clean-up projects involve a lot of walking and lugging around heavy stuff, it seems that no matter where I go, strangers will keep pulling over to offer me a ride. And because I do these projects even during extreme weather, the more intense the weather gets, the nicer people will become. (During the summer on really hot days, strangers will keep pulling over just to ask if I'm going to be OK working outside in the heat and if they can go and buy some cold water for me, and sometimes people will even try to give me an umbrella or an extra coat on days when it's raining or snowing.)
And there were times when I would pick up a penny that was in the middle of road or stuck in a crack in the sidewalk, and I guess that it would give strangers walking by the impression that I must need money, and sometimes people would actually pull out their wallet and start trying to give me money!
Strangers will also come up and thank me for what I'm doing, and sometimes they will end up talking to me for a long time, and I've ended up meeting a lot of friendly people this way.
I have been shown such a good side of people, that it simply wouldn't make sense for me to go back to being fearful of strangers and automatically imagining the worst-case scenarios about them. (Like I tended to do back when I didn't get out much and my view of the outside world was being shaped by watching the News.)
I don't doubt that there is crime in my area. (After all, "littering" itself is a crime, and there are MILLIONS of examples of this crime in plain sight where I live.)
But because I have been doing these clean-up projects, I've spent more time outside and less time looking at a screen in the past few years than I have at any other time in my life. And I know that what I am about to say will probably sound crazy to anyone who did the exact opposite of that and who spent the past few years locked in their homes and being bombarded all day long by the media with stories about crime, riots, racism, sickness, and war, but I honestly have never felt safer going outside than I do today.
I started picking up litter in my neighborhood because I wanted to help make the world a better place, and because it got me to get out more and start to base my view of the outside world on my actual experience in the outside world, the world is a much better place to me now, and that is the priceless treasure that I found while picking up a zillion pieces of litter.
That's a fun thing to do when you move cities, or countries.
I spent several weekends riding every single tram line in Helsinki with my son. We'd pick a number we'd not yet done and ride each both ways to the terminus.
Get out at the end of the line and see what was nearby, have a cake, then come back home.
We had a map from the local transport company and we'd put stickers on the lines we'd done, and the last stops.
A good way to see different neighbourhoods in the same city.
You want something simple, like a bucket, maybe with a funnel type opening, so that you can pick up the syringe with a grab tool and just drop it into the container with a minimum of handling or manuvering required.
Doctors and nurses who are practiced at handling sharps still stick themselves occasionally. You really don't want to touch them with your hands, even with gloved hands.
Seems the FDA agrees they’re suitable: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safely-using-sharps-need...
They’re pretty common in nursing homes in my area.
Eventually I got fed up and picked up a few bags full of trash. Then I found another guy nearby who also likes picking up trash, so we had a few get-togethers where we collect 3 trash bags each. He has a connection with our city sanitation department, so they come and pick up the bags.
The same guy also runs a once-a-month litter pick up event where we meet at the post office and spend an hour picking up trash. He provides hi-viz vests, trash bags, and grabbers. Usually about 10 people show up.
Overall it puts me in a bad mood to see so much trash thrown out by shitty people.
https://www.harborfreight.com/36-in-pickup-and-reach-tool-61...
[Interviewer:] Into another environment….
[Senator Collins:] No, no, no. it’s been towed beyond the environment, it’s not in the environment
[Interviewer:] Yeah, but from one environment to another environment.
[Senator Collins:] No, it’s beyond the environment, it’s not in an environment. It has been towed beyond the environment.
[Interviewer:] Well, what’s out there?
[Senator Collins:] Nothing’s out there…
EDIT: OMG, this may be my favorite website I've found in a WHILE! https://www.sixstepstobetterhealth.com/wheelbarrow.html
Unsurprisingly, trash can placement correlates with neighborhood wealth. Poorer neighborhoods get fewer city-managed trashcans, so more trash ends up on the street.
[1]: https://studentwork.prattsi.org/infovis/visualization/waste-...
And in some places like NYC you'd have to rival the police budget to make a dent in it.
A few hundred people dedicated to taking care of litter would likely make a difference anywhere. You can get that for far less than $6 billion. You could pay 1000 people $1000/day to do it and you’d be at $365mill.