MALE: Work's stressful and sometimes after work, you just need to take the edge off.

So grab a Pepsi and a sleeve of Oreos packaged in non-recyclable plastic wrapping and get a little rush on the drive home.

Oh yeah.

But please, always remember, to keep your car clean on your drive home and dispose of your waste out the window.

Public roads and the upkeep of our threatened environment is not your responsibility... NEWS REPORTER: Plastic is everywhere.

MALE: But your car is.

Think about the crumbs.

Get it off your seat, leave it on the street.

After all, some idiot, he'll pick it up anyway.

[Sound of footsteps on gravel] [Clatter of dishes and sound of kettle coming to a boil] [Smacking lips] ROB: Hi, I'm Rob.

I like to ride my bike, especially on the back roads where I grew up in Caroline County, Maryland.

But recently, I've noticed a lot more litter along our local roads.

I don't like litter, neither does my friend, Josh.

[Josh and Rob beat a tire] ROB: But I was curious to just how much litter there is.

So I set out on a mission: ride 15 miles along this route using my Dad's 30 year old bike with some trash cans rigged to a baby carrier we bought from my niece.

Sorry, Emma.

The rules are if there is trash on my side of the road, I have to stop.

I have to pick it up.

The goal was to see how much litter there was along this route and how long it would take me to complete it.

And mostly, just to have something to do on a Saturday.

Ooooh...

Plastic bag!

At the end of the day, we'd collect all the trash bags I left and estimate a total.

So at 7am, I hit the road.

♪ ["Feel Good Inc." by Gorillaz plays] ♪ [Sound of cars passing on the road] ROB: Heyyyy!

Uh, first bag down, approximately .4 miles away from my house.

So uh, onward.

I was raised to think that littering was unthinkable.

It could hurt the animals, pollute our streams, and it just feels wrong and looks bad.

So most of the morning I was questioning "why."

Why and how is all this trash getting on the side of the road?

Are people throwing trash out the window because they don't think it affects them?

Or because it's convenient?

Or because they already see trash on the side of the road so what's more piece?

Whose responsibility is it to clean up?

And what are these things?

It's about noon, I'm definitely getting tired.

About 5 hours in, I traveled 2 miles and collected approximately 5 bags full of trash.

An Australian guy stopped to tell me about his take on litter accountability.

[Chatter of conversation] ROB: After 8 hours or so, we picked up around 12 bags and we'd only traveled 3 miles.

YOUNG MAN: You just picking up trash?

I appreciate it, man.

You need some help or are you good?

ROB: After 10 hours, another kind stranger offered to join the mission and then my parents came out.

By 7:30pm, we collected over 27 bags of litter along only 4 miles of road.

11 miles short of my 15 mile goal, mostly because I stopped so frequently to pick up trash and, I also didn't choose the most effective methods to pick up trash.

[Car motors] [Sound of crickets] ROB: I was given 48 hours by my Dad to get the mountain of trash off our porch.

So the next day, I selected 4 bags to go through and counted their contents.

I categorized the makeup of each bag based on the recyclable: as plastic bottle, glass, paper or aluminum cans and non-recyclable: as plastic waste or general waste.

I tallied everything up and divided each category total by the 527 total pieces of litter between the 4 bags I counted and estimated the following breakdown of litter: 19.5 percent plastic bottles, 11 percent glass, 3.5 percent paper, 25.5 percent aluminum cans, 33 percent non-recycle plastic, 7.5 percent non-recyclable non-plastics, 0.01 percent panties.

So, if we assume that these 4 bags are representative of all 27, about 60 percent of the litter that I collected could have been recycled and about half of the litter I collected was plastic.

Also if I estimate that we picked up approximately 180 pieces per 30 gallon bag and 83 pieces per 13 gallon bag.

In total, we picked up around 3,904 pieces of litter along 4 miles of road.

And according to our local Public Works, we have 953.6 lane miles in Caroline County.

And in total I picked up trash along 7 lane miles, so assuming for every 7 lane miles, there are 3,904 pieces of litter, then right now in Caroline County, there are over half a million pieces of litter along our roads.

That's 17 times our population.

Of course, there's plenty of room for error in these numbers and I can't assume every road in the county has the same amount of litter, but regardless, it's a lot.

ROB: My Dad and I went through the remaining trash to pick out recycling, and in this process, I've learned I've been recycling wrong for years.

Almost all of the paper products from fast food restaurants I'd set aside to recycle are actually lined with plastic coating.

And the symbol on the bottom of plastic products doesn't necessarily mean they can be recycled.

It's meant to look that way so you don't question your purchase.

But it only tells you what type of plastic product it is.

Our county just recycles "1s" and "2s" and it turns out our nation's recycling system in general is pretty terrible when it comes to plastics.

It's more cost efficient to make new plastics, so 91 percent of plastics in the world aren't recycled.

And plastic takes over 400 years to degrade, so the problem is just compounding on its self.

[Dramatic music swells] [Seagulls squawking] ROB: It was a long winter so most of my reasoning to spend 13 hours on a bike picking up trash, was to get outside, help solve a local problem and to feel good.

But unfortunately, even the local problem of litter is way bigger than me.

Litter is just a symptom of a bigger problem of waste and consumption in our culture.

A problem that feels so far out of reach as a single person; yet a problem that will overwhelming affect all of us more and more in our lifetimes.

But the fact that one guy on an old bike that he can't get to stand up that well, sorry Dad, inspired conversation, and 4 other people to join in and collectively collect over 3,500 pieces of litter in a day, has to be a glimmer of hope.

Because the same compounding social effects that make people carelessly toss trash out the window can also encourage us to collectively question our habits, inspire each other to take care of our communities and our planet.

♪ [Walking on a Dream by Empire of the Sun plays] ♪