Taking Out the Trash

By Carrie Madren

03/24/2009

There is no park, no waterway, nor grassy swath of land in our watershed that has been untouched by the cigarette butt.

Our littering habit extends farther than cigarette butts - with the advent of plastics, we've formed new products that get loose in our environment. Chesapeake tributaries carry plastic bottles, plastic bags, appliances, tires, food packaging and more. These unsightly objects flow farther and farther downstream, into the bay and eventually the ocean, where they choke marine life, clog beaches or get caught up in mile-wide vortexes of swirling trash.

But along the Potomac River and its tributaries, once a year, volunteers wade along riverbanks to break the cycle. And on April 4, and throughout the month of April, you can help by volunteering to gather trash in the 21st annual Potomac River Watershed Cleanup.

The sponsor, The Alice Ferguson Foundation, started picking up along its own Prince Georges County, Maryland shoreline 21 years ago. Now the annual cleanup has spread to shorelines up and down the Potomac River and its tributaries. Last year's massive clean-up included nearly 400 separate sites in four states and the District, where some 12,000 volunteers removed over 285 tons of garbage and recyclables.

That load included 13,596 plastic bags, 1,309 tires and more than 109,400 recyclable glass, aluminum and plastic containers.

Cleanup volunteers also hauled in oddities such as 35 shoes, 28 shopping carts, 27 bicycles, 23 metal and plastic barrels, seven toilets, three skateboards, three lawn mowers, three tiki torches, two computers, five refrigerators and five televisions, plus a trampoline, a bowling ball, a 100-pound safe, a prosthetic leg and a bathtub. Past cleanups have yielded thousands of sports balls, five artificial Christmas trees, a surf board, a vacuum cleaner, a pogo stick and a coffin. And the list goes on.

Volunteers become stream and river explorers, scouting banks and unearthing new debris to haul up. Since 1989, over 35,000 volunteers have bagged some three million pounds of litter from the Potomac watershed.

Not only is such trash unsightly, but debris routinely harms wildlife, decreases property values, costs local governments money for clean up and removal and threatens public health by acting as breeding grounds for virus-carrying insects and rodents. It also diminishes pride in our natural areas. Litter knows no boundaries: it affects every sector of society - regardless of economic status, ethnicity and age.

You might devote yourself to bigger eco-problems - such as halting the Earth's slow roast under greenhouse gases - but litter is a good place to start, says the foundation's cleanup coordinator Ginny Harris.

"The average person doesn't know how to change global warming," Harris says. "But what they can change is how much trash they produce and where it goes."Organizers also hope that by getting their hands dirty, volunteers will develop a sense of stewardship, realizing the effects of algae blooms and storm water erosion as they inspect the banks for trash.

Such a grand-scale cleanup and trash-free campaign could be a model for solving bigger environmental crises, too.

"If we don't know how to solve our trash problems, we will never solve bigger environmental problems," says foundation executive director Tracy Bowen, who says she's optimistic about our region's ability to nix trash in waterways.

Around 2005, the foundation grew weary of retrieving tons of trash each spring, so Bowen and her staff decided to set a bold new goal for our region: to make the Potomac River watershed completely trash-free by 2013.

"It is an ambitious goal, but we see a lot of accomplishments already happening," Harris says. "We won't know if we've succeeded until we stand on the shoreline and see no trash." To reach the goal, the foundation is trying to get at the source of our litter addiction. They've persuaded decision-makers to pledge to take action on littering; they've also launched a campaign to shift our behavior. By creating a stigma around littering, Bowen and staff hope that we'll consider it unacceptable for people to flick a cigarette butt onto the ground.

Bowen sees change in attitude happening everywhere. For instance, the District of Columbia will soon vote on a law to charge five cents to customers for each plastic checkout bag used. "That's an exciting way to induce public to change behavior through market incentive," she says.

Changing our habits will take time, but you can be part of the solution now. Take part in a waterway cleanup near you. Join gloved volunteers at some 400 cleanup sites on the Potomac on Saturday, April 4 from 9 a.m. to noon. Find a site near you at http://www.potomaccleanup.org/trash_initiative/rc_sites.html.

For information on cleanups throughout the mid-Atlantic check out the National River Cleanup at http://www.americanrivers.org/site/PageServer?pagename=AR7_NationalRiverCleanup_Volunteer.