Mysterious sign, perhaps no longer in production?

October 5, 2009 2:36 PM

I can't for the life of me find a picture of a particular road sign, which I consistently misunderstood as a child. It's a traffic sign in North America that I saw many times as a kid but almost never any more. It was a yellow-orange sign with a "no" symbol and some random-looking detritus behind it, which I later understood to be a crumpled can. Probably a "no littering" sign, but a search on that or like terms seems to turn up nothing! A pretty silly question, I know! I ask partly because when I was a kid, I thought the item behind the "no" sign was a mouser from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
posted by RedReplicant to Travel & Transportation (18 answers total)

In the US, the standards for road signs are found in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). I flipped through my copy, but I didn't see a sign matching your description. It is likely that the sign you saw was a state or municipality specific sign. Try searching for your state's MUTCD (some states have one, some defer to the federal version linked above).
posted by Uncle Jimmy at 2:49 PM on October 5, 2009

This one?
posted by Admiral Haddock at 2:50 PM on October 5, 2009

Is it this one? From searching google for "Don't be a litterbug" it looks like it is/was a national campaign...
posted by sarahnade at 2:58 PM on October 5, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks Admiral, but that actually isn't the sign, although it does look a lot like it. As far as the municipality goes, I have seen it in a couple of states (Virginia and Pennsylvania) so perhaps something with a limited release but not to a single state or district?
posted by RedReplicant at 2:58 PM on October 5, 2009

I have seen this sign in Virginia. I still can't make out what the litter items are half of the time.
posted by JennyJupiter at 3:06 PM on October 5, 2009

Response by poster: Sarahnade, no, it had no characters on it. In fact it was very difficult to tell (at least for me) what was actually going on in the sign.
posted by RedReplicant at 3:08 PM on October 5, 2009

I know exactly what sign you're describing. I always thought the can resembled some kind of off-board motor and when I was young, I couldn't figure out what the darn the sign meant. It was placed through out Virginia. I've tried to google it up in different methods, and I even tried seeing if a sign was still on 250 bypass in Charlottesville, but no luck.

It's amazing how unhelpful google images is concerning signs. Yeesh.
posted by Atreides at 3:20 PM on October 5, 2009

Was it the one in the upper left in this image? If so, I can kind of see how it looks like a mouser.
posted by limeonaire at 3:43 PM on October 5, 2009

(I always thought that particular one looked like an old shoe, myself.)
posted by limeonaire at 3:51 PM on October 5, 2009

Or could it be this one?
posted by limeonaire at 3:58 PM on October 5, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks limeonaire, but no, although the first one you posted is close.
posted by RedReplicant at 4:11 PM on October 5, 2009

Another option.

(This feels a bit silly to all be guessing, but "litter sign with a can" is a pretty common icon.)
posted by smackfu at 5:21 PM on October 5, 2009

Is this the sign you remember? I grew up in Virginia - I don't remember ever seeing a yellow, wordless version of this sign, but I remember seeing this one frequently. (The Google Image search that finally turned this up for me, after a lot of tries, was "littering illegal sign va.")
posted by jocelmeow at 5:23 PM on October 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Also, if we haven't hit on it yet, there seem to be quite a few of them on this USLitter.org page.
posted by jocelmeow at 5:36 PM on October 5, 2009

That's the sign I had in mind. Guess we'll see if it's what the OP had in mind, too!

Great job finding it.
posted by Atreides at 6:36 PM on October 5, 2009

I don't suppose it would be this sign, would it? Pretty similar to limeonaire's first post, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

I find this amusing, because I saw these types of signs for the first time ever this past weekend while in the Niagra Falls area of Canada, and made mention of them to my wife, as we'd never seen "don't litter" signs with the "open can" motif before.
posted by illflux at 9:05 AM on October 6, 2009

Response by poster: YAY! Thank you jocelmeow, that is the sign. I think it was perhaps yellowed with age in my area. You are my hero!
posted by RedReplicant at 9:51 PM on October 10, 2009

Oh good! Glad to be able to help.
posted by jocelmeow at 9:24 AM on October 11, 2009