Pollution/Littering in Suffolk County

The Suffolk County is a good place to live in. Surrounded with good public beaches and well served with quite a number of shopping malls, Suffolk County offers the best life experience to its inhabitants. However, with the current rate of littering, especially on the streets near malls’ parking lots, the beautiful experience of the Suffolk County residents is about to be reduced. Recently, I observed that there has been a lot of littering outside Walt Whitman Mall. Many kids usually hang out outside the mall, where they leave fast food wrappers along with beer cans all over the place. Surprisingly, neither the mall’s employees nor the county council employees seem to get concerned about this mess. Cleaning along the streets near this mall is done less frequently, and when it is done, it is usually not thorough. Consequently, there are a lot of plastic bags and cans lying all over the place in Suffolk County. The quality of the water on the beaches has reduced due to contamination by plastic objects.

Recently, the Environmental Defense Fund started working cooperation with retail stores, to develop a software tool, which assesses the chemical component in packaging items such as plastic wrappers and cans, used by retail stores to package food products. Many retail store are in the process of introducing less toxic packaging items which will be biodegradable. This is a good move because it will reduce the amount of toxic substances being washed down to our beaches at Suffolk County. However, this does not seem to solve the problem of littering. Even if the packaging items used by the retail stores will be biodegradable, kids will continue hanging outside these stores, meaning, the littering will continue.

The Environmental Defense Fund in liaison with the retail stores can develop a better way of preventing littering around malls’ parking lots. One way they can prevent this is to restrict kids from hanging out at malls’ parking lot. If not so, fast food stores should not allow eating at their parking lots. Customers should be advised to either eat inside the stores, or carry their food to their homes. In addition, retail stores should place dustbins at their parking lots where customers can easily access them.