I haven't been able to adequately describe to young people how littered and dirty everything was in the 70's.
Every car had black smoke coming out, garbage everywhere, and up here we have all of the steel mills, a coal fired electric facility (back then) and a couple of oil refineries. We'd be on the playground and be running on can tabs, broken glass, used condoms, razor blades, and cigarette butts.
When we lived in Whiting by what was Standard oil, we would have to clean the ash off of everything outside and we would have pink snow in winter. The exhaust from cars would turn the snow black. Everything was disgusting.