Living Lands & Waters, Philadelphia Water Department, Partnership for Delaware Estuary and over 230 volunteers collected 16+ tons of trash along the Delaware in 20 cleanups from August 20 to September 2 (link)
Photo shows volunteers headin g out to one of the cleanup sites. Click the image to see Flickr photos from the cleanups.
Great job, thanks to all who participated and organized this effort.
Short video by Julie Lawson on Trash Free Maryland’s 2015 Trash Trawl.
Time to start planning the 2016 Delaware River – Bay Trash Trawl!
Posted in Plastic Pollution, TTF Watershed
Tagged Chesapeake Bay, Green City Clean Waters, plastic waste, Trash Trawl
The Schuylkill River through Fairmount Park is one of Philadelphia’s treasures. Unfortunately, upstream stormwater runoff carries trash to the Schuylkill River, where some gets caught on the River banks while the rest continues to flow downriver to the Delaware River and Bay.
This Schuylkill River bank trash survey was conducted on the West bank from the dam to Girard Ave bridge on 4/7/15.
There is a significant quantity of plastic debris along the shore line caught in the vegetation along the bank .
Here’s a quick trash photo survey of N 9th and Nobel Streets that I took on Saturday, January 3rd. This corner is a little less than 1 mile from City Hall.
1. Map of N 9th & Noble Streets
2. Illegal Dumping and Trash Filled Inlet
3. Trash Along N 9th Street
4. Trash Along Noble Street
Posted in Phila Trash
Tagged Green City Clean Waters, Illegal Dumping, Philadelphia litter
Street and stormwater litter conditions vary across the City, with the TTF and Cobbs Creeks having the worst creek trash problems while the Pennypack and Wissahickon Creeks having less creek trash.
This map, prepared with ESRI’s ArcMap, shows the incidence of 2013 litter Code Violation Notices for the 5 small creek watersheds in Philadelphia.
Clearly, the Tacony-Frankford and Cobbs Creek watersheds have much more serious litter conditions than than the Wissahickon and Pennypack Creek watersheds.
The Tacony-Frankford Creek has a major stormwater trash problem, as discussed here, here and here.
In this post, I want to show how to map watershed boundaries, Philadelphia City Council District Boundaries and litter Code Violation Notice data to show the geographic relationships between chronic litter areas, stormwater flow and creek trash.
Here is my map:
I made this map using ESRI’s ArcMap and Philadelphia’s open Code Violation Notice data. There were 6,258 litter code violations in the Philadelphia portion of the TTF Watershed. The Tacony Creek Park, highlighted in data green in the map, receives a large load of stormwater litter that gets caught along the banks and in vegetation along the banks.
Philadelphia released code notice violations (CNV) data in June, 2014 (here, here). In this post I want to show an example of what Philadelphia citizens can do with the City’s data to dig deeper into the causes – locations of Philadelphia’s litter problem.
First, let’s look at the map that I produced from the CNV data: a chloropleth map of 2013 CVN by Streets Department trash collection districts for 2 litter violations:
There were 31,129 litter CVN, the number of violations by trash collection district vary from 0-50 (green areas) at the low end to a maximum of 1,527 (red areas). While this map doesn’t fully explain the City’s litter problem, it does show the pockets of litter free and litter prone areas. This map, coupled with other data on trash receptacle, housing stock conditions, bus stops, litter generating establishments can begin to focus attention on necessary remedial steps.
Philadelphia, under Mayor Nutter,has an excellent open data approach. Interested citizens working with the City’s open data will be able to take the next steps in tackling City litter by measuring the extent of the problem and conducing year-to-year assessments of progress.
Posted in GIS, Phila Trash
Tagged Green City Clean Waters, Litter GIS, Philadelphia litter