I'm growingly perplexed by the whole concept. Throwing waste on the floor in random places is called littering. I used to robotically put it in the bin but sometimes now I just don't. This is not because I am lazy. Here's my thoughts on the matter.
It dawned on me, that, I put a substance in the bin and it got emptied and dumped somewhere else - that's all! Some mound of waste on the outskirts of town or burnt - my crisp packet becoming a scrap of air pollution floating around in the upper parts of the sky. It still exists, just in a different form. This isn't classed as littering for some weird humanitarian reason.
It seems that the whole idea of littering revolves around us and not our planetry home. We're constantly just shifting around our waste. Leaving it still is called littering.
I sometimes think that we should live in our own shit rather than shifting it around, emptying it or burning it.
This is our creation - no other species creates indistructable substances. Outside our commercial bubble of humanity everything is recycled. Something does a shit - something else eats it. It's true! The only substances that can't be broken down are created by mankind and i dare say the odd woman. Think about it, when you're putting something in the bin you're indirectly putting it in the ground or the air. That's the point! So long as it's away from us we don't care. It takes time for these two wastebaskets to fill up, then all living things, not just us will suffer. We'll probably be the last to because of our technology that caused the problem in the first place.
To put a crisp packet on a paving slab is thought of as wrong. Putting a paving slab over greenery isn't thought about.