Philadelphia has a street trash problem that is being mislabeled as a litter problem. We all understand litter, the soda bottle, snack food wrapper that is tossed on the sidewalk. Unfortunately we tend to use litter for all “street trash”, both gross illegal dumping and the extraneous snack food wrapper.
I have started using street trash to label all street-sidewalk-vacant lot-park space debris, including tires, TVs, mattresses, bulky items-furniture, residential trash as well as the pedestrian snack food droppings. All is trash, all has wound up in our common space, hence the term street trash.
Here are several Philadelphia 311 illegal dumping service request photos taken from the 311 OpenDataPhilly website (link) on Monday, February 6, 2017.
-
- Big Belly overflowing with trash. Notice plastic bag with happy face next to Big Belly. Excess trash will eventually fall to sidewalk.
-
- Illegal Dumping -bags of trash may rip,spill, and scatter over a wide area, appearing to be “litter” when it is actually trash.
-
- Illegal Dumping – bags will rip and scatter trash, appearing to be “litter”
-
- Street Litter – where did it come from? Was it dropped by pedestrian or dumped in a bag that ripped and spill trash?
-
- Street Litter – looks like residential trash bag opened and spilled
We will only have clean streets when we address and begin to control our illegal dumping crisis. Much of what we call litter actually start as bags of residential trash that are placed on a sidewalk by someone unwilling to wait until the next trash day.
Let’s start to call all dumpers by their right name, DUMPERS. An old mattress or soda bottle tossed on the sidewalk comes from the same thoughtless behavior. We need to go after all dumpers, big and small.
Philadelphia’s Zero Waste & Litter Cabinet (link, link) is a great opportunity for Philadelphia to begin to control out waste & trash future. It is absolutely critical that we recognize the importance of illegal dumping in litter efforts. We need to tackle both illegal dumping and litter to get our streets to the cleanliness level that we want.