152 Pieces Per Person

Nearly 10 billion butts!

Did you catch the Things You Didn’t Know About Litter presentation the other day? Among all of the great data points provided was one from the Keep America Beautiful 2020 National Litter Study: there are an estimated 50 billion pieces of litter out in our environment. That's around 152 beer cans, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, grocery bags, and assorted other scraps of civilization for each and every person in the country.

From Keep America Beautiful

152 pieces of litter.

If you have been around the Greenway in recent days, it's probably not hard to believe! This time of year litter is conspicuous: heavy spring rains and snowmelt wash trash from roadsides into the Greenway, and strong winds can blow trash out of bins that aren't secured, off passing vehicles, and out of nearby construction areas. Much of the tall grass and stems that may have kept the ground from sight has been flattened by those same winds, revealing piles of plastic, styrofoam, and aluminum.

What is to be done about all this trash? Well, first of all...pick it up! Join the SDNA Team Up to Clean Up event on Sunday, April 24 to help clean up the Greenway. Bring a bag on your walks around the neighborhood, or informally "adopt" a stretch of road that you notice looking trashy. Can you pick up 152 pieces of litter? Or maybe 304 pieces? How about 608 pieces?!

The presenters for the program, Jane Wilch, Recycling Coordinator for the city, and Beth MacKenzie, UI Sustainability Program Manager, offered suggestions for being involved beyond simply picking up trash, including helping to collect valuable data through an app like Litterati or Marine Debris Tracker, which can help scientists and policymakers understand where trash comes from and where it ends up, and hopefully develop solutions to prevent it.

But why should I have to pick it up? I didn't put it there.

Good point. The easy answer is, if not you, who? I, personally, can't tackle every person tossing a can out of their car window and force them to find a recycle bin. I can't personally issue citations to people who leave their dog's waste bags along the trail "to get on the way back" (but never seem to come back the same way). I can't march the developers out into the Greenway to pick up their construction debris after a windy day. But I can spend an hour or two every month cleaning up, just because it needs to be done.

But we're just individuals, it's the corporations causing this mess with their single-use packaging and shoddy, cheap manufacturing methods! Make them clean up after themselves!

Absolutely. That's why things like our Bottle Bill and other producer responsibility legislation should be a priority. The price of a product should include its entire lifecycle, from creation through use to disposal. States with a bottle bill recycle more than twice as many of their beverage containers than those without.

Have you been to festivals downtown, where the food vendors use compostable utensils and charge a higher price because those materials cost more? That's exactly backwards of what it should be. Imagine if the disposable plastic knives and forks, the styrofoam to-go clamshells and the plastic wrap all had to include the costs to recycle or landfill them in the up-front cost, instead of allowing those costs to be covered by our municipal waste systems. Would the compostable materials still seem more expensive? Would people make different choices if they had all the facts, and the products were priced accordingly?

And yet...the litter is out there. I can lobby for a better Bottle Bill, and for EPR legislation. I can make better choices in my purchases. But none of that beats the satisfaction of filling a few bags with litter and seeing a clean Greenway when I'm done.

Sun-bleaching on littered cans near the Greenway