Have the things you find on the ground changed in the last 30 years?
March 15, 2022 2:42 PM Subscribe

If are one of those people who finds things on the ground or sidewalk and you did this in the 90s or 00s, have the things you found changed over time?

It might be difficult to tell if one is finding less of some category but finding something you wouldn't expect elicits "wow, look what I found".

posted by bdc34 to Grab Bag (74 answers total) 25 users marked this as a favorite

Yes! Many more of those one-time use plastic dental flossers now.
posted by shesbookish at 2:48 PM on March 15, 2022 [36 favorites]

At risk of being too on-the-nose... masks! Masks masks masks.
posted by dusty potato at 2:52 PM on March 15, 2022 [38 favorites]

Yes, those little bastards, lots of them. Vape cartridges. What's interesting is that the pull tabs that were phased out in the late 70s still turn up, especially near ground that has been disturbed by construction or what have you.
posted by Countess Elena at 2:54 PM on March 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Fewer plastic… ends of cigarettes? Cigarette holders? They were usually white and narrower in the middle than on the ends.

Plastic bottle caps and to-go-lids instead of metal bottle caps.

And, as above, so many flossers.
posted by clew at 3:01 PM on March 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Way less cash.
posted by saladin at 3:03 PM on March 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

Less cash, marginally fewer cigarette butts, way way way more surgical masks, heaps more plastic bottles and caps and wrappers and bags. No flosser outbreaks near me that I've noticed.
posted by flabdablet at 3:11 PM on March 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

More plastic in general. Fireball bottles of course, scourge of the environment. Less folding money for sure, and fewer coins (though I'm still having reasonable luck at that). Fewer broken CDs and cassette tapes. Fewer marbles. More bits of kids' plastic toys. I have a knack for finding feathers and also more playing cards than one might expect; no noticeable falloff in either category.
posted by Miko at 3:17 PM on March 15, 2022 [8 favorites]

Way fewer coins
posted by raccoon409 at 3:20 PM on March 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Fewer pencils and pens now. (I live near the high school I attended in the mid/late 90s.) Those have decreased even over the last ~5 years.
posted by minsies at 3:21 PM on March 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

So many masks around nowadays. I see a lot of flossers and a lot of those little one hitter alcohol containers that hold a shot or two. Less fast food trash. I see more socks now? Same amount of cans, more beer and less soda. Definitely more energy drinks. We're just getting into snowmelt/mud season here so I'll see if I notice anything else this week.
posted by jessamyn at 3:22 PM on March 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

A couple of years back there were piles of nitrous oxide containers but I haven't seen those in a while.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:22 PM on March 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Fewer cassette tapes (though not none). More earbuds. More used diapers, because people are monsters.

The stuff you don't expect is stuff that is basically a one-off, so you don't come to expect it. Like the time I found a hand truck that presumably had bounced out of the bed of a pickup.
posted by adamrice at 3:32 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fewer wheel weights. I used to find these a lot when I was a kid. It looks like adhesive ones are becoming more popular, so maybe they’re more reliable?

Not really a “thing on the ground,” but fewer caterpillars and chrysalises.

More of those little liquor bottles and energy shot bottles.
posted by music for skeletons at 3:33 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

fewer neat bugs, sadly
posted by The otter lady at 3:40 PM on March 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

There used to be more matchbooks
posted by unknowncommand at 3:50 PM on March 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

It is my theory that there is a fundamental generational split between those who remember the heroin epidemic of early-late 1990s, and those can not imagine let alone remember the idea of used needles and foil and other debris just everywhere. Things are so much better now.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:53 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fewer plastic… ends of cigarettes? Cigarette holders? They were usually white and narrower in the middle than on the ends.

The kind from Old Port (and similar) tipped cigars? Used to see them all over the place. Not so much any more.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:55 PM on March 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Canada - no more pennies.

Nowadays, lots more injection needles, clinic handout drug rigs and condoms.
posted by porpoise at 3:56 PM on March 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Tons of plastic water bottles, most of them not even empty. (It may sound gross, but I do open and empty them. It bugs me to see all that water stuck inside bottles that will never deteriorate).

Masks masks masks. I can be deep in the woods on a trail, and I will always find a stupid mask.

Less beer cans!

And yes, those flossees everywhere.
posted by annieb at 4:02 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Way less cassette tape (the tape itself, snarled into a sparkly hairball, rather than the cassette itself). Fewer hair picks and combs and brushes and ponytail holders and scrunchies and those ponytail Doojobs with the two beads and barrettes, in favor of so much discarded dental/breath paraphernalia. Fewer amphibians and reptiles. Most of the other changes I suspect are more about my geographic situation than the march of time.
posted by janell at 4:03 PM on March 15, 2022 [5 favorites]

Never forget the rise of dogshit tied in a bag and abandoned.
posted by janell at 4:04 PM on March 15, 2022 [35 favorites]

A lot less pavement-gum. It used to be that every pavement had a white polka-dot pattern of hardened gum. I see a lot less of it nowadays. Has the formula changed to that it breaks down quicker, or are people just binning it now?
posted by pipeski at 4:17 PM on March 15, 2022 [11 favorites]

Definitely cassette tape is rare to nonexistent now.

Where I live: way more nitrous bulbs ('nangs' in local parlance). Fewer syringes.
posted by pompomtom at 4:18 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Fuckin Flamin Hot Cheetos man. The packets, a singular dropped cheeto, Flamin Hot Cheetos everywhere. Never regular Cheetos, never puffy. Just the Flamin Hot.
posted by phunniemee at 4:21 PM on March 15, 2022 [7 favorites]

Less: yeah, cassette tapes, used to see those everywhere, and then broken CDs. Not so much anymore. Way fewer cigarette butts, but even more noticeably, fewer empty cigarette packs. Don't see too many beer cans or bottles anymore either. I think at some point mid-2000s I used to see broken earbuds everywhere, but not so much anymore.

More: food wrappers, all over the place (on preview: especially flamin hot cheetos). Plastic bottles, again, all over the place. Liquor bottles, especially the pint sized glass bottles, but also the plastic mini bottles to maybe a slightly lesser extent (you can't buy them individually in DC, which may explain that).

About the same: chicken bones and takeout containers. At least they're not styrofoam anymore, I guess? And I think I see coins about the same amount.
posted by General Malaise at 4:27 PM on March 15, 2022

Oh yeah, and you don't see those cigar tips as much as you used to, even as recently as like 2010.
posted by General Malaise at 4:28 PM on March 15, 2022

There's a song about this.
posted by credulous at 4:31 PM on March 15, 2022

Awesome answers. Thanks. Masks are totally fine as an answer. I've seen decreases in wheel weights, cigarettes, beer cans, cassettes. Spark plugs too. I bring it up because I found a $100 last fall and found another one this week. Similar numbers of tools, pliers, sockets and screwdrivers. Always on the lookout for the elusive road glove pair.
posted by bdc34 at 4:39 PM on March 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Fewer business cards. They used to be everywhere, often with added info penciled or inked on them.
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:43 PM on March 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Regionally differing observations: now that I live near a place where people with substance abuse problems gather, I do see lots of syringes and some whippets. I don't see actual sharps, either because I can't perceive them or because there is a disposal box nearby. Since I have a dog to walk, I gotta look hard.

In the South, I would see a lot of cigarillo tips, even this year, presumably used as blunts.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:08 PM on March 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Around our place I would say fewer cigarette butts (still very much nonzero, but fewer) and far more general convenience store trash. As in, I bought a mini bottle or a pack of Swisher Sweets or a giant cup of soft drink or a twinkee or whatever, and gobbled it down as I was walking or driving away from the store, then threw the remaining trash on the ground right there. Every convenience store is the center of a "trash-plosion" of this sort, with convenience store trash piled thick all along the streets right near the store and gradually decreasing as you get further from the store.

The smoking rate is going down over time here (esp. with the rise of vaping) and we just had a new convenience store move into the neighborhood, so that probably explains the differences I'm seeing here - they're probably not very universal.
posted by flug at 5:10 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

One time I picked up a trailer reel from a local theater off the sidewalk. I imagine they're almost all digital now.
posted by credulous at 5:10 PM on March 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

CDs are still surprisingly common, masks definitely making an appearance now, and also, I've found two guns.

Those are rare but they do make an impression.
posted by flug at 5:15 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Ugh, the masks. We do the occasional loop of our blocks and pick up trash. We say, "5 points for a mask!" because that's more fun. I have to say though, they are a real problem. Masks are super lightweight and fiddly. You don't notice if you've dropped one! They don't fold up well and you don't want to ruin your nose comfort curve by doing that. My kiddo has masks coming out of every pocket of every jacket and hoodie. Everytime she gets in or out of our car, just about, we have to holler at her to pick up her mask that fell out of the car, her pocket, etc.. You put your hand in your jacket pocket and your sleeve snags a mask on the way out and you never know that you dropped something. They drive me crazy but I like to think that many people are like, "Dammit! Where'd my mask go?!"

Yes to the flaming hot cheetos. Maybe they short-circuit something in one's mind?
posted by amanda at 5:21 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

My local crows know how to open Mylar bags and seem especially interested in orange ones. They’ll carry them along and drop food and shout and scuffle over them.

I mean, humans also, but it could be crows.
posted by clew at 5:34 PM on March 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

I love this question! I'm having to think hard because I moved somewhere rural-ish during the pandemic but prior to that I lived and worked in a major city and honestly there is not a lot of junk in either place because the city was constantly being cleaned and the rural place just has less trash to start with. So - in either place - if I noticed rubbish it could just be decades old, ie in the places that have rarely been cleaned up.

Having said that I would say there's been a marked change in paper trash - no more yellowing newspaper, old magazines, discarded porn-in-the-woods type stuff but a huge rise in flyers for pizza, take-out, fast-food etc.
posted by socksister at 5:43 PM on March 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Less white dog poo (not that I was picking that up!) More low-grade ready-to-drink bourbon and cola cans.
posted by slightlybewildered at 6:06 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is printed photos. I run across far fewer of them now than years ago.
posted by plastic_animals at 6:11 PM on March 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

Brilliant question!

Lately I've seen unopened food (as in grocery items) left out. In the last few weeks, I've seen (separately, on different days, on different locations around the neighbourhood) a bag of buns/rolls, 4 unopened yogurts (the single serving kind sold as a set), a few pre-packaged something or other (sorry, I'm tired) together on the edge of street planter, a few other things. These were all new, unopened. I wondered if people were leaving these out to help out others? It is still winter here so things would keep, but maybe the uptick is just a coincidence and they fell out of the shopping and someone moved them to the side?

I saw a dime on the side of the road yesterday and wondered if there will be more change because fewer people will want to pick it up (and it will accumulate)? Partly because of going cashless but also because it ain't worth risking being hit by a car for a dime. A bill, maybe but a small coin doesn't have the purchasing power.

(Incidentally, I was leaving work a few weeks back and someone else coming out of the building spotted a fiver on the sidewalk very close to me. I thought it hilarious (and brilliant) that his was first reaction after picking it up was to swivel his head, looking everywhere around to see if there were any more bills around.)
posted by philfromhavelock at 6:51 PM on March 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

These ugly wire wheel hubcaps were common to find on the side of the road 20 years ago anywhere in North America, but hubcaps in general are less common these days.

Computer parts like floppy drives and fans aren't as commonly seen due to better e-waste programs.

VHS tapes with...well, you know.

More common: nips (the little plastic liquor bottles).
posted by Seeking Direction at 7:10 PM on March 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Fewer tied-together pairs of sneakers thrown over phone lines, more individual shoes sitting on roadsides.
posted by baseballpajamas at 7:48 PM on March 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

I see way fewer one-use plastic bags, fast food wrappers and liquor bottles. Now of course, it's the blue surgical masks, orange peelings, abandoned dog poo bags, and most distressing, syringes. (I always leave my recycling bin out by the alley and lots of people politely throw their beer and liquor bottles in there that they formerly tossed in my side yard by the street.)
posted by a humble nudibranch at 7:50 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Chunks and pellets of styrofoam. They are everywhere, all the time.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:18 PM on March 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

In my neighborhood, still plenty of cigarette butts, syringes, and empty beverage containers — but the latter have evolved from glass beer/liquor bottles to aluminum tallboys of “Premium” flavored malt beverage.

Still the occasional plastic mouthwash bottle, certainly.

Masks, for sure.

Dog poop is still around but not quite as prevalent as a decade ago. Maybe the dogs are eating less because of inflation.
posted by armeowda at 8:46 PM on March 15, 2022

Also, less gum! I feel like ten years ago I was stepping in gum every day. I can't remember the last time I stepped in gum. I do see a lot of gum in urinals, though. Which is pretty grim. It doesn't piss away, guys. I've tried.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:03 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

You used to find playing cards - they became scarce starting around thirty years ago however and are now rare enough that they startle me.

You find less kids' mittens and hats and winter gear, and fewer kids out door toys. I believe this is because they increasingly are not outside unsupervised. If you do find them they are exclusively on school routes.

I am not seeing juice boxes, but I am seeking lots more red bull and other stimulant drink containers.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:03 PM on March 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

At one point 10 - 15 years ago, I found a lot of playing cards. I find a lot of hair elastics; people have smooth hair, they slide off.
posted by theora55 at 11:34 PM on March 15, 2022

This is a great question, thanks. I've always been a huge pavement-picker-upperer...

I feel like there used to be a lot more wire/metal plates/electronic-ish stuff? Or maybe it fell off of cars? Also, there was often a lot of blue nylon rope, which I don't see any more.

Now (Edinburgh, Scotland): masks; plastic bottle rings that attach the cap on; hair ties; elastic bands from the postie...
posted by sedimentary_deer at 12:26 AM on March 16, 2022

bright orange syringe plunger end caps.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:50 AM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just in case it's of interest: one of my favourite things is Harry Smith's collection of found paper aeroplanes, which he collected from the streets of New York for more than 20 years. You can see the collection online. Something that has disappeared!
posted by happyfrog at 1:25 AM on March 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Blood sugar test strips
Water bottles
posted by sciencegeek at 2:09 AM on March 16, 2022

used condoms! ugh!
posted by james33 at 4:35 AM on March 16, 2022

Plastic bottles have gone down since there's a deposit on them these days (in the Netherlands), I expect to see fewer drink cans next year as they will have a deposit system too.
Masks, ugh. We need a deposit system for those.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:38 AM on March 16, 2022

When I lived in the PNW where recreational cannabis was legal I saw tons of the little cylindrical plastic containers that weed is sold in around on the street and sidewalks (they remind me of the little canisters we would use to store pogs in when I was a kid).
posted by forkisbetter at 5:21 AM on March 16, 2022

Things have changed more based on where I live than when I live. Right now I find a lot of hair extensions (ugh) and puzzle pieces (??).

I still sometimes find film negatives, which are my favorite to try to reconstruct.

You might want to hit up the archives Found magazine. It has only been around ~22 years, not 30, but collects stuff from all over.
posted by Ookseer at 7:09 AM on March 16, 2022

Perhaps this might be a Canadian thing but I almost never see spent 8 shot ring caps. In fact we found some on the street pre-Pandemic for the first time and I had to explain to my kid (12) what they were and how they were used. When I was a kid (70s and 80s) these were so ubiquitous that we'd collect them in the off chance that we could find some without unfired caps.
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:29 AM on March 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

In my eastern US city I still see lots of plastic cigar tips. A new thing for me is nerf darts in residential areas. When I was little those things were gold, you would track them down if you shot them outside. Another one is landscaping gloves that fall off trailers.
posted by being_quiet at 8:13 AM on March 16, 2022

Totally gross gobs of spit on the rise! I'm in my seventies, I remember ubiquitous signs telling people not to spit when I was a kid and a young adult in NYC and other places. For the last several years I've noticed spitting is like a fad, people do it everywhere, blatantly.

I always used to find single earrings but now that you mention it I haven't found any in a while.
posted by mareli at 8:41 AM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Fewer playing cards and film canisters.

More masks, Airpods or knockoffs.
posted by Fuego at 9:14 AM on March 16, 2022

→ the little cylindrical plastic containers that weed is sold in

In Toronto, these things are everywhere. Like, more common than Tim Hortons cups.
posted by scruss at 9:48 AM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I feel like I don’t see Mike’s Hard Lemonade bottles as often as I used to; they’ve been replaced by Truly cans and the like.
posted by Seeking Direction at 10:17 AM on March 16, 2022

I find a ton of lighters -- not bics, but those janky knock-offs; rectangular, made of colorful transparent plastic that seem to break long before the butane is used up. So I still find bics, but not as many, because they cost more than the cheap ones.

Swisher Sweet packages are everywhere, but plastic sleeves, not the cardboard of my youth

Wish I could figure out a use for spent whippets, they're all over the place...
posted by Bron at 1:03 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

spent whippets, they're all over the place...

I'm gonna assume this is a regional name for some kind of drug because the two definitions I know for a whippet would be very confusing.
posted by Ashwagandha at 2:27 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Empty Eppendorf tubes, used for selling cocaine around these parts. The slang term for them is 'pino'
posted by Tom-B at 2:48 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

No one has mentioned lottery scratch tickets yet... they were all over the place in Massachusetts, but I never see them in California.
posted by acridrabbit at 2:55 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Seattle, observations from 25 years: Far, far less wire hangers, lots of new empty weed packaging, mostly the 1-2.5 g packages. Less money, yeah, tons of flossers (what the hell?), less broken glass (though not none) and more huge empty plastic sport drink containers. So many takeout containers, the ones that are black bottoms/clear tops and snap together very poorly. So many mysterious single rubber gloves. Less needles than 20 years ago but definitely more than 10 years ago. Bagged dog poo instead of raw poo. More human feces. Stable amount of single child sized shoes. Less boxes full of actually good random stuff from someone moving, wayyyy less magazines, less random books at a bus stop or in the park.
posted by Grim Fridge at 4:17 PM on March 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm a bicyclist, so I see lots. No broken 8 -track or cassette tapes any more, and fewer CDs as well. I see a lot of empty whippit (nitrous oxide) cartridges lately. More big screen TVs by the road than I'd ever have anticipated.
Can I self link and survive? I photographed the stuff I found on the bike trail during my commute for years. It's on Insta at https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/ccbiketrailoffering/
Oddly someone else started using the tag I'd hoped would stay unique — #ccbiketrailoffering — so there are a few random motorcycle photos that aren't mine.
posted by cccorlew at 9:08 PM on March 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

spent whippets, they're all over the place...

I'm gonna assume this is a regional name for some kind of drug

Whip-it nitrous oxide
posted by flabdablet at 12:42 AM on March 17, 2022

(us-suburban-rural) Much of the coins seem to have been flung from cars--it is generally at sharp turns in the road, and mostly pennies.
Also, not mentioned above, possible because it is so obvious: automobile fragments, baroque silvery shapes of the taillights of yore.
And can someone who drank fireball more than once explain: why?
posted by hexatron at 3:23 PM on March 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

And can someone who drank fireball more than once explain: why?

I feel like someone asked a question here once about Fireball and why they were seeing it at a grocery store or some other location that does not typically permit alcohol. I don't remember the answer but maybe it's more widely available for some reason? I'm assuming it's cheap and lots of people like flavored alcohol (especially young people) because then it doesn't taste "like alcohol." Here's a take on it.
posted by amanda at 11:59 AM on March 18, 2022

Wipes. I don't know if they're baby wipes or butt wipes or disinfecting wipes, but they're all over the local trails. Unlike tp, they don't ever seem to break down.
posted by peeedro at 9:36 PM on March 19, 2022

Some of those wipes are made of rayon, which on a chemical level is just cellulose so it will eventually become something's dinner. But quite a lot of them are a blend of cellulose fibre with polyester and that stuff isn't going to biodegrade for at least several hundred years, because the microbiomes in the places where these things collect have not yet had time to adapt to the recent and rapid onslaught of novel human-created chemistry though I'm sure they're giving it the old college try in fatbergs everywhere.

So wipes are going to keep on washing down waterways and into the ocean, where they'll just keep on killing whatever ends up ingesting them. Disposable wipes are awful. Just say no. Or if you absolutely can't say no, make sure you only use the pure rayon ones. Those don't fall apart anywhere near as fast as toilet tissue (whose main design criterion is its ability to come to bits quickly in water) but at least they do eventually rot.
posted by flabdablet at 11:00 PM on March 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

More discarded tangled fishing line down by the river. Seems like people who fish these days aren't as concerned with taking their trash with them as they were in the past.
posted by ambulocetus at 6:29 PM on March 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I find it hard to distinguish between temporal and regional changes, since I've lived in different places every decade.

The tobacco products now are mostly Swisher Sweets or other flavored cigarillo ends or packaging, rather than the cigarette filters that I saw everywhere twenty years ago. I wonder if the cigarette crowd has moved to vaping, or if the industrial midwest is just different.

School assignments are as common as ever. Personal letters seem more rare, but that may be just random statistics. Liquor bottles are the same, though there seems to be more hard liquor now than the fortified wine and malt liquor bottles I remember in 2000. That might have more to do with local liquor laws than social change.
posted by eotvos at 8:37 PM on April 11, 2022

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