Crap in a creek

McDonalds usually gets a pasting when it comes to litter, the environment and all that guff. So here is a completely unscientific and unrepresentative sample of photos to show you that McDonalds are really very green indeed.

Exhibit 1 - a chip packet lying in the mud just next to the Bay walking path. Given that it is cardboard, and not very waxy cardboard at that, I reckon it will have disolved and broken down in a month or so. Recycle. Bio-degraded.

I think the old term used to be "rotted". Funny how "rotting" has gone out of fashion and "bio-degraded" has come in. As a word, "rotting "stinks. Bio-degradable sounds so much cleaner and fresher.

What was it that Orwell said about words and their use?

When I was 12 or 13, I spent a few weeks on a sheep station mustering sheep. It was pretty dry, and quite a few died either on route to the shearing shed or in the holding yards. Us boys had the fun job of picking up the carcases and burning them - after we had picked off the dead wool. I remember the colour of the bloated bodies - green and purple - and how much they stunk if you happened to puncture the gut wall. We were doing the old one-two-three with one sheep and as we got to "three" and were about to hurl it onto the flames, the rear legs popped off and all the guts came out and it was a hell of a mess.

Somehow, "bio-degradable sheep" is not how I remember it.

Enough stinky sheep stories. Exhibit 2 was taken about 10 feet away, and you'll have to trust me on this, but there are 12 bits of litter in this photo, which shows a stretch of mud about 8 feet wide. It was like this for several hundred feet. In that whole area, the only McDonalds litter I saw was the chip packet, and it will rot. All the rest of this crap is plastic, and it will still be there when I climb down into the mud next CleanUp Australia Day.

I bet if I sent these photos to the SMH, they'd just use the one with the big golden arches on it and ignore the other 99% of crap.

Hundreds, if not thousands of people walk past this spot each day, and I wonder how many bother to look over the edge at all the litter lying in the mud just below them. Some people really are grotty bastards.