The World is Our Litter Box
By Shawn Dell Joyce
Recent flooding rains wash it into our lawns, collect it in the gutters by the roads, and consolidate it on storm drains. With no leaves as camouflage, we see the plastic bags caught on bare branches. Beer bottles, tin cans and Styrofoam cups nestle like Easter eggs under shrubs and bushes. Litter is a man-made blight on the local landscape.
But litter doesn’t end in the Wallkill Valley. In his eye-opening book; “The World Without Us,” Alan Weisman describes a small continent of litter floating in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. His words: “It was not unlike an Arctic vessel pushing through chunks of brash ice, except what was bobbing around them was a fright of cups, bottle caps, tangles of fish netting and monofilament line, bits of polystyrene packaging, six-pack rings, spent balloons, filmy scraps of sandwich wrap, and limp plastic bags that defied counting.”
What is the source of all this flotsam and jetsam? Captain Charles Moore of Long Beach, Calif., is quoted in the book as concluding that “80 percent of the mid-ocean flotsam had been originally discarded on land. It blew off garbage trucks, out of landfills, spilled from railroad shipping containers, washed down storm drains, sailed down rivers, wafted on the wind, and found its way to the widening gyre.”
According to Keep America Beautiful campaign, “People tend to litter because they feel no sense of personal ownership. In addition, even though areas such as parks and beaches are public property, people often believe that someone else like a park maintenance or highway worker will take responsibility to pick up litter that has accumulated over time.”
A walk through Winding Hills Park, Benedict Park, or any of the Rail Trails and you will see that otherwise normal people are thoughtlessly dropping trash. These folks are our friends, neighbors, and (gulp) even ourselves. So how can those of us who do really give a hoot stop this blight?
Keep America Beautiful engages people in cleaning up their community and engendering the feeling that they have a vested interest in their environment. The organization points out that litter can also happen accidentally. As in overflowing garbage cans waiting for curb-side collection. Or from trucks at construction sites that are not properly covered. Even from municipalities that don’t offer litter cans and proper receptacles in public places.
Every year, Keep America Beautiful hosts the Great American Cleanup from March 1-May 31. This is the nation’s largest annual community improvement program, with 30,000 events in 15,000 communities. Last year, volunteers collected 200 million pounds of litter and debris; planted 4.6 million trees, flowers and bulbs; cleaned 178,000 miles or roads, streets and highways; and diverted more than 70.6 million plastic (PET) bottles and more than 2.2 million scrap tires from the waste stream.
What you can do to help?
• Want to organize a cleanup in your community? Go to www.kab.org to volunteer.
• Grab the kids and some empty buckets and walk the banks of the nearest stream picking up litter. Be sure to separate recyclables from trash.
• At home: Keep a litter bag in the car, bungee cord your curbside garbage can closed, and carry a pocket ashtray if you smoke. Teach your children to be stewards of the earth.
• At work: Ask your boss to “adopt a road” and take responsibility for keeping it litter-free, conduct a recycling drive at work to collect paper, usable clothes, tires and other goods that can be donated.
• In your community: Identify eyesores and organize civic groups to eliminate the litter, create a “trash fishing contest” to clean up the water ways. Take computer equipment or deliver it to the transfer station.
Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning columnist and director of the Wallkill River School and Art Gallery in Montgomery, NY. Shawn@zestoforange.com
Tags: Shawn Dell
March 18th, 2010 at 10:06 pm
A few stray thoughts as I read through this column:
What happened to the 200 pounds of litter and debris collected by the Keep America Beautiful volunteers? Did 80% or it get blown by the wind out of landfills and down storm drains? How much of our properly discarded litter actually stays where it’s supposed to?
Many years ago the Beacon Sloop Club hosted the crew of a sailing vessel that crossed the Atlantic. The crew dragged a net every day for a period of time, and every single day they pulled in some sort of plastic trash. Imagine what the oceans are like today, if they were that littered some 20 years or more ago!
One summer day I walked with a woman from New York City along a country road from a camp to a small store nearby where we were planning to buy cold drinks. On our return trip, after finishing our drinks, she very graciously took my empty can and threw it, along with her own, into a vacant lot. When I protested, she tried soothing me by saying, “It’s okay. It’s just wild. Nobody owns that.” Sometimes city dwellers are under the impression that upstate New York is some kind of frontier town surrounded by unclaimed wilderness.