Picking It Up

When I got back from my morning walk a few days after Christmas, 2010, I carried a plastic shopping bag bulging with stuff. Not consumer goods from post-Christmas sales, but empty Miller Lite and Budweiser cans, empty Red Bull and Pepsi and Coke cans, tiny Jim Beam bottles, wadded fast food bags, crushed cups, a Gatorade container, empty cigarette packages, a discarded glove, five playing cards (high card: King of Diamonds), a noodle box, and a short length of rope.

I picked all of this stuff up from the side of the road. I simply cannot walk past it anymore. Once I got home I sorted the trash from the recyclables and put each in its appropriate receptacle.

Then I washed my hands.

I've been on a renewed anti-litter kick for the last year or so. I hate litter – and I mean hate. It astounds me how casually people treat the earth – like it's a big garbage dump.

During warm weather, when I bike a lot, I often carry a shopping bag with drawstrings that can be worn backpack style. It doesn't take long to fill. I don't always take the bag along, though. When I carry it I have to make so many stops, it gets in the way of a decent ride.

Now, in the cycling off-season, I walk. And I always take a plastic bag with me, filling it with litter and moral outrage.

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There used to be a guy in my town who spent long hours each day picking up litter. He was a familiar site, riding around on a mountain bike carrying big trash bags filled with discarded cans and bottles. I'd see him morning noon and night, summer and winter, riding along with a couple of big overstuffed bags. Sometimes I'd see his bike propped on the side of the road, and there he'd be in the weeds, bent over to retrieve a can or bottle.

On the next-to-last day of January 2009, as he rooted about collecting litter along a major thoroughfare, he was struck and killed by a car. He'd been twenty-five or thirty feet from the road. Initial press accounts stated the driver was under the influence of prescription medicine, but this turned out to not be true. In any case, there was a tremendous outpouring of grief from the community. Within hours someone created a Facebook page to honor him, and a few months later someone else was inspired to organize a community clean-up. Hundreds of people pitched in to pick up litter, and it's become an annual thing. On the first anniversary of his death, the town unveiled a statue in his memory.

But I'm not trying to take this guy's place. Litter offends me and always has. When my high school-age son was in first grade, I suggested we pick up all the litter we found between our house and his school, a distance of five or six blocks. He could take the collected stuff to school for show-and-tell. I secretly hoped his demonstration would shock his classmates, and convert them.

In any case, my anti-litter stance has intensified. Every day during my walk I pass a grassy knoll where teen drunkies congregate at night. They leave behind assorted empties, so I pick them all up. I pass a fast food place and find discarded bags and cups strewn along the sidewalk. I pick them up. I cannot pass this stuff by.

We are but a short distance into 2011. It is not too late for resolutions, if you make them. Along with the usual vows to quit smoking, lose weight, etc etc, I urge everyone to think about trash. Not necessarily to the point where you carry around an empty bag to collect litter, but to be mindful of always disposing of stuff properly.

The Heidelberg Project

The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan, is one of those things that must be seen to be believed.

It's the creation of artist Tyree Guyton. It is not about litter or trash, and never has been. But it does say something about reclamation.

Located on the city's tough East Side, the Heidelberg Project is usually described as an "outdoor art environment," or as a political protest against the decline of a once-great American city.

It is all that, and more.

"I was told that my job as an artist was to come up with solutions," Guyton says. "I came up with a solution that makes people put aside the fear. And they come here because they gotta see it."

The project dates to 1986 when Guyton, encouraged and assisted by his grandfather, began painting brightly colored polka dots on a series of houses, some of them abandoned. Then he began attaching salvaged materials to some of the houses.

The environment has evolved steadily over the years. In spite of the positive, worldwide attention it has drawn, it's been the center of considerable controversy, most of it local. It's all that salvaged stuff attached to the houses, I think, that really pissed people off. Is it art? some wondered.

It is art, came one answer, that responds to its place.

The City of Detroit owned the titles to some of the houses. On two occasions, they have had some them demolished. Most likely these include the house in the black and white photos in this post.

But where parts of the Heidelberg Project have been destroyed, new stuff has been created.

Another view of the Heidelberg Project. That's me in the mirror.

Strictly speaking, the Heidelberg Project may not be about litter or trash. But it has turned trash into treasure; it has looked at a lot of cast-off stuff as a valuable resource.

I saw the Heidelberg Project back in 1990, when I still lived in Detroit. It still exists. It gets its name from Heidelberg Street, on which it resides, and where Tyree Guyton grew up. Many who live in the area today find it a point of pride.

"I want to be part of that great comeback for the city of Detroit," the artist declares. "And I do believe it's going to come back."

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The Heidelberg website: www.heidelberg.org/

Recycling Center

A couple of years ago my daughter's elementary school class went on a field trip to the local recycling center. I came along as one of several parent chaperones.

I've been recycling for years, but always wondered: where does this stuff go after curbside pickup?

Why, it goes to the local recycling center!

Where I live it's called Eco-cycle, and it's located on the far edge of town. It is enormous. Recycling trucks haul their loads into a huge garage area, and from what I could tell, empty them right on the floor, as in the lower-left quadrant of the above photo.

An automated system separates containers like cans and bottles from paper products. They wind up on conveyor belts, where humans sort the stuff into more specific groups.

Needless to say, the kids found it totally fascinating. So did I.

After watching all the conveyor belts take stuff to and fro, we were escorted into a meeting room and our heads were filled with factoids.

Over the last fifty years, we learned, humans have consumed more resources than in all previous history. The way we produce, consume, and dispose of products and food accounts for 42% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. With less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes 33% of paper, 25% of oil, and 15% of coal.

This data all come from the EPA.

On a more positive note, about a hundred million people in the United States now practice some sort of recycling every single day. This is good. But recycling, in and of itself, is not enough; it will not end our dependence on landfills and incinerators.

This optimistic Eco-cycle graphic imagines the future

The goal promoted by Eco-cycle is Zero Waste. This is laudable. Discarded stuff, they argue, should be seen as a valuable resource. "A pile of 'trash' represents jobs, financial opportunity, and raw material for new products," they declare.

"Zero waste is a philosophy and a design principle for the 21st Century; it is not simply about putting an end to landfilling ... it heralds fundamental change."

Like the rest of the world, my town has a long way to go before fully realizing this fundamental change. Recycling is big here, but we have a town dump, too. To say nothing of litter: the crushed cups and cans, fast food wrappers, cigarette butts, and on and on.

Freegans

We throw away so much stuff in this world that an entire subculture sustains itself from it.

It's called Freeganism. Freegans get virtually all of the stuff they need from dumpster diving, or as some more politely call it, urban foraging.

"Freegan" is a hybrid word, a fusion of free and vegan. They come in a range of stripes and shadings. At their most militant, Freegans are both pragmatic and political, involved in "a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations."

Freegans say they can obtain just about any consumer good you can think of from dumpsters, and that these goods are clean, safe, and perfectly useable. A long list presented on their web site (freegan.info) includes food, furniture, books, toiletries and electronics. In short, if you can throw it out – and we certainly can – then a freegan can recover and use it.

The most committed freegans not only harvest consumer goods from dumpsters. They also squat in abandoned buildings, and advocate getting rid of cars in favor of bikes, rollerblades, or walking. (Presumably public transportation is okay.)

I couldn't be a freegan. I wouldn't want to be out there without health insurance (a right, not a privilege) or taking a hot shower every day.

But I admire the freegan ethic. I find it encouraging that they are able to take care of most of the basic necessities in life without spending any money.

Litter: One Day's Haul

The sickening truth, as if we didn't know, is that I (or you) could pick up litter all day every day for a year, and there'd be no appreciable dent in the problem.

Supposedly, 48% of all Americans will admit to having littered at one time or another. Stir in those who don't admit it, and the rate is probably more like 99 or 100%.

I've littered. I don't anymore. I'll still toss down a banana peel or some other biodegradable item, but I don't consider that littering. Maybe it's a double standard, but I'm concerned with the stuff that doesn't decompose.

In my town, there's plenty of litter. I pick it up in spite of the futility.

I did a little Googling on the subject. My keywords were "roadside litter statistics." I found a site called Green Info Services, which says the following are the biggest sources of litter:

1. Trucks with uncovered or unsecured loads on local roads and highways.
2. Pedestrians or cyclists who do not use the receptacles.
3. Motorists who do not use car ashtrays or litterbags.
4. Business dumpsters that are improperly covered.
5. Loading docks and commercial or recreational marinas with inadequate waste receptacles.
6. Construction and demolition sites without tarps and receptacles to contain debris and waste.
7. Household trash scattered before or during collection.

None of this is the least bit surprising.

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So I'm still picking up litter. On my walk today I took a bag along for the first time in over a week. We had a good-sized snow storm recently and it covered everything.

But I still took my daily walks. I was out the other day after a cold snap broke and all that snow finally began to melt. Came across an empty Bicardi bottle just off the sidewalk, on a patch of newly-exposed grass. I had not brought a bag with me so I picked the bottle up and put it in my jacket pocket. A couple inches of its neck jutted out. I must have looked like  the town drunk.

When I went out today I forgot to bring a bag. But a nearby grocery store has a bag recycling program, so I stopped by and plucked one from their canister.

It didn't take long to fill. Mostly I picked up the usual crap: recyclable bottles and cans, empty potato chip bags, empty cigarette boxes, and so on. But I came across a scrap of a to-do list (I'll tell 'em what they can do!) and, curiously, a little Zen garden.

This isn't really a Zen garden, of course. It's just some rocks piled up, probably by teenagers as they passed around a joint. Before I took this photograph I picked up a bunch of litter here. There was more than I could possibly stuff into my little bag, but I found a cardboard box and filled it with a bunch of crap. Left it by this rock pile as a sort of wastebasket. Think they'll get the hint?

The Writing on the Wall

By the way – I pick up empty cigarette boxes, but I do not pick up cigarette butts. The reason should be obvious. By one estimate there are 4.5 trillion butts improperly disposed of each year.

How ever did they arrive at that figure?

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Statistics cited in this post come from the Keep America Beautiful website.