Littering: A Small Card, A Big Impact

It was early in the morning, and I was waiting at the bus stop to go to work. The time was around 8:10 AM, and the bus would arrive in about seven minutes. While waiting, two men approached the stop. They looked to be between 30 and 40 years old. They had a KonyaCard (the public transport card used in Konya). They walked up to the ticket machine.

One of them inserted his card into the device, but it didn’t work. He then pulled it out and dropped it on the ground. I caught it out of the corner of my eye—one of those moments when you’re turning your head and something flashes in your vision. At first, I thought, “The card must have fallen.” Out of simple human decency, I went up to them and said, “Brother, I think your card fell.” His answer was short and clear:
— “No, it didn’t fall. The card was broken, so I threw it away.”

At that moment, hundreds of thoughts raced through my mind. Should I have said something harsh? Should I have raised my voice? Should I pity people’s ignorance instead? With the world already so polluted, forests burning, and rain no longer falling the way it used to—how could someone so carelessly throw a plastic card onto the ground?

What made it worse was that just two steps away, there was a trash bin. Konya is actually quite good in this regard; you can find trash bins almost everywhere. But instead of taking two steps, he chose to throw it right there.

That card was made of plastic. And plastic is a material that doesn’t dissolve in nature for hundreds of years, never fully blending into soil or water. So it doesn’t just pollute the environment—it poisons our future. Let’s say you don’t care about the planet. Let’s say you don’t care about nature. But what about the sanitation workers who will have to clean up after you? Is it really so easy to disrespect their labor too?

This incident once again showed me:
When a person throws garbage on the ground, it harms not only the environment but the entire society.

🌍 The world gets polluted.
👥 Society suffers.
💪 Sanitation workers carry an extra burden.
🕰️ The plastic thrown will remain in nature for hundreds of years.

We can all make a huge difference with small steps. Throwing our trash into the bin instead of on the ground is actually the simplest sign of environmental awareness. A small card may look like a small piece of trash. But the truth is, it can take centuries for that card to decompose.

That morning at the bus stop reminded me of something important:
There is no excuse for harming our own world.

Throwing trash on the ground may be easy, but picking it up is always harder. Out of respect for nature, for people, and for labor, we should at least take responsibility for our own waste. Because the world is our home—and we have no other place to go. 🌱