[RP TownTalk] Street sweeping

[Dwight Holmes]

I was searching for some littered highway scene photos from the 60s.
Didn't succeed, but I came across this interesting article that
reports that, in fact, littering continues to *decline* in the U.S.,
and what has changed is our expectations/standards about littering.
(So this may be another example of the 'golden age syndrome', where we
tend to always believe that things (whatever the topic du jour is)
were better way back when than they are today.

I'm sure there are wide variations in how much of a litter problem a
community has, and it very probably correlates highly with "zip code",
which represents an array of socioeconomic indicators including
education and income. I'm guessing there's more litter along our
streets and streambeds here in our 20737 than in, say, Kensington.  As
with many such things, I'd hazard a guess that a reasonably good
predictor of whether somebody will litter or not would be their
mother's educational attainment.


By Frank Greve | McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/25267.html

WASHINGTON — America is getting cleaner, litter experts say.

They estimate that deliberate trash-tossing has fallen about 2 percent
a year since the mid-'70s in communities where it's been measured.

On U.S. beaches, cigarette butts, beverage cans and Styrofoam peanuts
for packaging are down, cleaners say. In most communities,
pooper-scooper laws now make carefree strolls possible. Even along
roadsides, more of what's visible today is grass.

Remarkably, the improvements come despite an increase of 90 million in
the U.S. population since widespread trash surveying began in 1974.

If you haven't picked up on litter's decline, don't be surprised.
People raise their standards as places get cleaner, so they're never
impressed, according to John Doherty, New York City's sanitation
commissioner. "The more you improve the cleanliness level, the higher
people's expectations are."

Doherty, 69, who started out as a city street-sweeper in 1960, has
lived the progress.

Thirty years ago, independent assessors rated nearly half of New
York's streets and sidewalks as filthy. "A sweeper'd go out and
there'd be mounds of steaming dog waste," Doherty said. "That was
tolerated then."

Twenty years ago, New York was still so dirty that humorist Dave Barry
accused the mayor of having appointed a Commissioner for Making Sure
the Sidewalks Are Always Blocked by Steaming Fetid Mounds of Garbage
the Size of Appalachian Foothills.

Today, the same independent assessment system used 30 years ago rates
95 percent of New York's streets and sidewalks as clean. Once-rare
litter penalties now are the second biggest source of the city's
revenue from fines, after parking violations.

As New York goes, so goes the nation, albeit by fits and starts, since
litter curbs are almost entirely a local or state matter. For example:

    * In New Jersey, revenue from special $50 Shore to Please license
plates subsidizes cleanups of river, bay and ocean shorelines by state
prisoners.

    * In Washington state, a multimedia "Litter and it will hurt"
campaign warns motorists of the state's serious litter fines: $1,025
for tossing a lighted cigarette, for example. The effort has cut
litter by 20 percent on state-overseen highways and roads since it
began in 2002, according to Megan Warfield, the state's coordinator of
litter programs.

    * In Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and
Washington state, people who spot highway litterers can rat them out
to hot lines by reporting their license plate numbers. The numbers,
converted to vehicles' owners' addresses, generate tens of thousands
of warning letters yearly. "That really gets their attention,"
Warfield said.

    * In Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas, litter-law
prosecutions are up sharply, according to John Ockels, the director of
the Texas Illegal Dumping Resource Center, a nonprofit organization in
Sherman, Texas, that fights litter. "Nobody running for office in
Texas ever wants to be soft on crime," Ockels explained, "and nowadays
that includes environmental law enforcement."

    * In and around Augusta, Ga., junk cars get towed if they won't
start. Littering citations against waste and recycling trucks are up
1,300 percent over last year, thanks largely to police traps on the
road to the landfill. Neighborhood associations demanded the added
enforcement, said Marshal's Office Sgt. David Bass, the head of the
anti-litter unit.

Beyond enforcement, many factors aligned against litter. Recycling,
for example, has made people more conscious of solid waste of all
kinds. Tourist destinations discovered that it paid to be litter free.
The same schoolchildren who pulled cigarettes out of their parents'
mouths got on them when they littered.

It isn't that U.S. attitudes toward litter changed, said P. Wesley
Schultz, a social psychologist at California State University at San
Marcos. "People never had a very favorable attitude toward litter,"
Schultz said. "What we HAVE seen is a fairly dramatic change in
people's norms about how appropriate it is to litter.

"People now feel littering is inappropriate and that others will
disapprove of them if they litter. The norm about what's right and
wrong changed."

The result is a dramatic shift in the nature of the U.S. litter
problem, according to Steven Stein of Gaithersburg, Md., a
professional litter and marine debris surveyor and analyst.

Litter that's intentional — tossing an empty Gatorade bottle, for
example — used to be the bulk of the problem. Today, however, it's
mainly unintentional or negligent, according to Stein: the bag of
trash that flies out of a pickup's bed when it hits a bump or the
tread that peels off an overinflated tire.

Stein, 54, should know. He's the director of operations at MSW
Consultants of New Market, Md., a trash-surveying company. For eight
years, he's strolled randomly selected but representative stretches of
U.S. roadsides counting and classifying litter for local or state
authorities.

Early spring is best, Stein said, before adopt-a-highway volunteers or
sanitation workers disrupt the samples. He counts and analyzes litter
within 3 feet of roads, then counts trash that he encounters on a
standardized meandering walk up to 20 feet from the road.

"It's challenging. I love it," Stein said. "The source is the big
question, and there's a lot of detective work to it.

"You take a corrugated box. If it's got a lot of dust, it's likely to
be from a construction site. If it's crushed and it smells terrible,
it's probably from a garbage truck. If it's crushed and it doesn't
smell terrible, it's probably from a recycling truck."

Knowing litter's source helps focus prevention efforts, Stein said.
It's key for sanitation departments, which can collect trash for $20
to $30 a ton but spend hundreds of dollars a ton to pick up litter.

Why does a litter count matter? Sometimes it's to document a trend. In
Georgia, for example, litter-fighting Gov. Sonny Perdue wants
measurable reductions. In Kansas City, Mo., where littering is down,
and in Charlotte, N.C., where it's been up and down, surveys help
grade local Keep America Beautiful campaigns.

The only attempt thus far to establish a national litter trend, issued
in 2006 by prominent waste consultant Dan Syrek of Sacramento, Calif.,
found declines of roughly 2 percent annually. The figure is based on
the results of 62 surveys that Syrek or others have conducted using
his methodology since 1974.

The findings have two flaws: One is that the surveys don't add up to a
national result. Second, only communities that are concerned about
litter pay for surveys, so they're probably exceptionally eager to
clean up. Nonetheless, based on his research, Stein also concludes
that there's been a decline in litter.

He and his partners will test that proposition starting in March, when
they launch the first serious national litter survey in 40 years.
It'll compare current levels to benchmark national litter data
compiled by the National Academy of Sciences in 1968. Keep America
Beautiful, a nonprofit based in Stamford, Conn., is sponsoring the
research under a grant from Philip Morris USA.

Until their survey is complete, the most telling evidence is probably
the amount of litter that washes up on beaches, summing up all inland
efforts. Those results are encouraging, too, said Seba Sheavly, a
marine litter consultant for the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy and for
the United Nations Environment Program.

At many U.S. sites with repeated beach surveys or cleanups, Sheavly
said, "The number of things people pick up is declining." Worldwide,
she added, "Things are level to downward, not on the rise."

Keep America Beautiful, the nation's biggest nonprofit cleanup group,
is at www.kab.org. It's funded mainly by Waste Management Inc., the
nationwide hauling and landfill company, and by producers of consumer
goods implicated in litter.
McClatchy Newspapers 2008