Generally, people learn how to clean up after themselves when they’re quite young. Someone might have to put their toys away when they’re done playing with them, or be directed to organize their desk at school. It’s a pretty common practice.
I’ve never been very good at this myself, admittedly, and anyone who has seen my extremely logical and well organized pile of paper on my desk can attest. But even as someone who doesn’t mind clutter at all and who finds folding clothes to be a very aggressive form of torture has limits.
That limit has been reached by people who are careless about how they treat masks and gloves.
Wearing masks is great, but there is exactly one place a disposable mask can go when it has outlived its usefulness, the nearest garbage can.
The handy thing about masks is that since you wear them, you’ve got a handy way to hold them until you reach that garbage can, just keep them on your face and you’re fine. Easy! The really handy thing about Yorkton is that there are lots of garbage cans around here, whether they’re on the street, in homes, or in businesses.
Given that the masks function as a barrier between mouths and potential disease, they’re also very important to dispose of properly, for the safety of anyone who might be forced to handle one. Tossing the mask anywhere but a garbage can is an inherently selfish act, because it’s saying other people who will have to handle it don’t matter.
This made it very horrifying to learn that people are just tossing them wherever, including boxes for the Marketplace. They’re also tossing gloves in there too, which are just as bad for the exact same reason. There’s one thing that belongs in those boxes - The Marketplace, naturally - and they’re not meant to be some sort of weird garbage bin.
But it’s selfish to just talk about ourselves here, and we’re not the only ones who have to deal with discarded masks. Turns out selfish people like throwing them all sorts of places where they don’t belong and other people have to pick up after them.
Of course, it’s easy to accidentally drop something without noticing, and I’m not talking to people who lose their masks unintentionally.
No, this goes out entirely to the people who just drop them on the ground or stuff them somewhere like a newspaper box, the people who could easily just wait until they found a garbage can, but don’t, because they are too childish to take out their own garbage. In fact, putting them in such a place proves that people know perfectly well they need to put them somewhere, so why they don’t just find a garbage can is beyond me.
Let’s be clear here, even the messiest among us should have some standards, and it should be a simple case to just toss out masks and disposable gloves in the one place they can go without affecting anyone else - an actual garbage can.
