Green Thursday: Coud you put that in the trash, please?

I hate litter. Everywhere I go I see cups and paper and plastic bags and wrappers all over the ground. I do my best to pick up what I can, but I'm a little worried about touching some of this stuff. You could help a lot by using trash cans. Even in our work bathrooms, there seems to be an inability to get a paper towel into the trash. If you miss, pick it up!

The world's beaches and shores are anything but pristine, too. Volunteers scoured 33,000 miles of shoreline worldwide and found 6 million pounds of debris from cigarette butts and food wrappers to abandoned fishing lines and plastic bags that threaten seabirds and marine mammals.

A report by the Ocean Conservancy catalogues nearly 7.2 million items that were collected by volunteers on a single day last September as they combed beaches and rocky shorelines in 76 countries from Bahrain to Bangladesh and in 45 states from southern California to the rocky coast of Maine.

"This snapshot of one day, one moment in time, serves as a powerful reminder of our carelessness and how our disparate and random actions actually have a collective and global impact," Vikki Spruill, president of the Ocean Conservancy, said in an interview.

The 378,000 volunteers on average collected 182 pounds of trash for every mile of shoreline, both ocean coastlines and beaches on inland lakes and streams,.

The most extensive cleanup was in the United States where 190,000 volunteers covered 10,110 miles - about a third of the worldwide total - and picked up 3.9 million pounds of debris on a single Saturday last September.

That's 390 pounds of trash per mile.

We're the bad guys in this. Trash doesn't fall from the sky. It actually falls from our hands.

The debris ranges from the relatively harmless, although annoying and an eyesore, to items that annually result in the death of hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine mammals caught in abandoned fishing lines and netting.

A third of the items found came from smokers.

The volunteers collected and catalogued nearly 2.3 million cigarette butts, filters and cigar tips. And they found 587,827 bags; more than 1.7 million food wrappers, containers, lids, cups, plants and eating utensils; and nearly 1.2 million bottles and beverage cans.

Every Green Thursday we post items vital to the planet.