I have a pet peeve. It is littering. Every day, everywhere you look, you see advertisements on why littering is bad for our environment.

In our newspapers, at the stores and on our monthly billing statements, all we see is “Save our planet. Please recycle.”

While doing my job, delivering the mail, I see people throw out fast food bags as well as other trash all the time. I see them use our roadways as personal trashcans. I am angered by them, but how can we expect people to use proper trash disposals when our local companies are doing far worse?

I watch the Leader carriers try to stuff the Leader into full boxes. The papers fall on the ground and are scattered everywhere with no one there to clean them up. But that is nothing compared to what I watched on Sept. 9, 2014.

I saw a blue van in front of me with its four-way flashers on. My first thought was that they were having car trouble. I kept an eye on the vehicle while delivering my mail.

Then I noticed it was throwing something out of the window in front of the mailboxes and in the driveways. When I got closer, I saw it was a Frontier telephone book in a plastic bag that they had been throwing out.

If I had a row of mailboxes, I had them in between the boxes as well as on the ground. They were everywhere.

Over the next few days, we received a lot of rainfall. This rain made the plastic bags fill with water and ruin the telephone books. So out of al the telephone books delivered, maybe a few weren’t ruined from the rain.

The rest are still lying on the sides of our roads and are now wasted trash littering up our roadways.

Shame, shame, shame on Frontier. A company of that size should not be able to pay people to litter our roadways.

 

Shirley Ann Osborne

Dowagiac