Hikers visiting the Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park may notice that the area has hardly any rubbish bins. The move is part of an effort to promote litter-free hiking, according to Metsähallitus Outdoor Recreation and Visitor Manager Pekka Sulkava.
Park management removed the bins previously located in rest areas as well as shelters and lodges along the Pallas-Hetta route last winter. The goal is for all bins to be removed by next year.
According to Sulkava, the practice of hiking without leaving litter behind is steadily gaining popularity in Finland.
“Nature centres have also promoted the idea of litter-free hiking and sold plastic bags for carrying litter so that they don’t get scattered in people’s rucksacks. People have been buying the bags and at the moment it seems that the amount of rubbish at the park’s break areas has clearly decreased,” Sulkava said, adding that he has noticed a change in hikers’ attitudes towards littering in the past decades.
Finland’s natural resource management firm Metsähallitus says that the move has been welcomed by parkgoers.
“Litter-free hiking has become the norm, that everything brought gets taken away and that nothing is left here,” Tuuli-Anna Tuohimaa a hiker from the city of Pudasjärvi, near Oulu, told Yle.
“And you don’t really see any rubbish along the trails, seems like it has become a given,” co-hiker Jaakko Matero added.
Park rangers have also been installing more informational signs within parks and transitioning from traditional outdoor restrooms to ones that are more cost-effective to purchase and simpler to upkeep. All toilets have also been made unisex, meaning that they are no longer separated by gender.
“The unisex model means that the toilets get used more evenly, which reduces the need for maintenance and costs,” Sulkava noted, adding that “overall, the feedback has really improved this year.”
The number of visits to Finland’s national parks has levelled off from the record set in 2021. Some 595,000 people visited the Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park in 2022, down from nearly 700,000 in 2021.
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Feels like: let’s remove hospitals so that less people get injured 🤷🏼♂️
Not in the slightest. It’s not exactly a massive burden to take your rubbish home with you.
It’s not about burden, it’s about the ststistical possibility this happens.
Not stealing a car isn’t s burden either, would you let your car sit on the street unlocked though?
Good laws/rules should avoid problems instead of hoping everyone would follow them, which never happens anyway.
That’s why you don’t just outlaw hateful speech and hope for the best but try to instill in young people why hateful speech is bad.
You need a solution that scales and isn’t depending on good will is all I’m trying to bring across 🤷🏼♂️
Good culture is not needing to legislate against stupid behaviour. I’ve been to beaches in Europe which are very clean and beaches in Turkey which are full of litter. Both have rubbish bins which are collected regularly. It’s all down to local culture.
I am not sure how removing the littler bins will help. Sure there are disciplined people trying to abide by laws and such, but the more a place gets popular, the more it attracts trash? It’s an odd choice to remove the means for people to dispose of their litter properly.
Perhaps there’a another angle to this?
I guess it speaks more to how many fins are cleanly by nature when it comes to their travel and camping?
Because, yeah, sure, above a certain critical mass this is good. Less animals plundering bins and so on.
Try that over here, and it’s the opposite. We need more bins so people stop throwing trash everywhere when there’s always a bin within arm’s reach pretty much.
Litter bins attract curious animals
Oooh. Should we just spread them out everywhere so they won’t congregate in the place? (I don’t know if I’m joking or not anymore)
If that is the point of view, then it should be OK, I guess? I mean, hiking is not that as popular a trash-magnet activity compared to crowd attractions like parks. Right?
You don’t understand the Finnish, they love their country and will do everything to protect it, even if it is nonsensical to the west
Now that is a point I can understand. Because where I came from, people just litter left and right even with the bins around. Such a pain.
They’ve done this in South Australia too. Still not sure whether it promotes littering or not.
Japan is probably the cleanest country I’ve ever been to and you rarely see a bin on the street. Easily accessible bins promote carelessness with the trash you produce. If there are no bins you need to think ahead and plan how you’ll dispose of your trash.
Or you end up with rubbish strewn all over the road, sidewalks, pathways, and open spaces like you see in NYC after they removed trash cans for fears of bombs.
It’s not even there are no bins, it’s a faux pas to use a bin that isn’t yours (like even vendors in a market). You have save everything for a 7/11 lol
I went to Hawaii and they added MORE trash cans on a particular hike.
I asked why and it was because foot traffic tripled. I said is it because of all the littering, and he said, “People accidentally drop things. Baby bottles, tissues.”
