Drawing the line on litter

There is nothing special about the intersection of County Road 228 and Highway 25. It's just a random, typical junction in rural Cape Girardeau County just south of Jackson.

It would be easy to drive past this place every day and not take notice of what lies here next to this small bridge that passes over Williams Creek.

If you weren't looking for it, if you were just on your way to work, you probably wouldn't notice the 10-inch-by-4-inch piece of discarded cardboard. Or the plastic blue Wal-Mart bag, the Combos wrapper, the barbecue sauce container, the Burger King bag, the glass Welch's grape juice bottle, the green tea wrapper, the beer bottle, the compact disc and the two plastic water bottles.

But when a person goes out looking for trash, it's easy to find along Southeast Missouri roads. Just at this intersection alone, more than 25 pieces of trash "decorate" Cape Girardeau County's landscape. And that's just on the south side of this relatively quiet intersection.

It's just one example, a snapshot of a local, statewide and national littering problem.

Apparently, the garbage is getting bad enough, at least locally, that many people are starting to notice. The Southeast Missourian's opinion page has been, well, littered with comments and letters complaining about the trash in and around Cape Girardeau.

Even Cape Girardeau's mayor is talking trash.

Jay Knudtson, a large man who played college baseball, occasionally rides a Harley and was at one time a professional hockey referee, said he saw a man drop a fast-food bag out of his truck onto a parking lot in Cape Girardeau recently. The truck bore an Illinois license plate.

"I stopped and knocked on his window," the mayor said. "I told him to get his trash and his Illinois butt out of my city. Actually I didn't use that language."

Knudtson said the city is looking into its littering ordinances and will consider "getting carried away with fines if we have to." He has already directed that city jail inmates be used to clean up Cape Girardeau's streets and vacant lots.

"We're going to absolutely declare war against litter," he said. "From time to time, every mayor and every city council takes the position that they're going to address litter. I assure you we're going to take this one to the next level."

The litter problem varies from town to town. Jackson Mayor Paul Sander called the litter problem in Jackson an "isolated" one, where occasionally trash gets out of hand near the high school.

In Scott City, Mayor Tim Porch said it's an "ongoing problem that's almost impossible to keep up with." He said parking at the caboose park in Scott City was limited to business parking only after teenagers repetitively left trash scattered on the ground. For more than a year, the town has used inmates to pick up trash around town.

City leaders generally agree that litter is worst along state highways and interstates, the areas that get the most traffic.

It's difficult to quantify just how big the problem is and just how much trash is being dumped along the roads.

A recent study by the state of Ohio showed that, per mile, an average of 475 pounds of litter were deposited annually along Ohio's highways and interstates. Interstates were particularly trashy. An average of 1,665 pounds of litter were deposited along interstate and U.S. routes, with no significant difference between rural and urban. Roughly 243 pounds of debris were tossed on county roads in Ohio.

Of that debris, 19 percent was plastic, 17 percent was glass and 16 percent was paper.

In Missouri, the state is "just starting" to track the volume of garbage collected along the roadways, said Stacy Armstrong, the state's roadside management supervisor.

For instance, from her own experience as a volunteer highway trash collector, she says about 10 to 12 bags of garbage can be collected on a busy half-mile stretch of road in Jefferson City.

Cape Girardeau jail inmates recently picked up seven bags of trash on Ranney Avenue, a fairly quiet residential street in Cape Girardeau.

Bonnie Stahlman, who lives on Highway 25, said her family has to pick up debris out of her front yard at least once a week.

As far as cost, the Missouri Department of Transportation spends $5 million per year on roadside cleanup.

Missouri Department of Conservation agents spend an undetermined amount of time enforcing litter statutes.

And nearly $1 million worth of labor from the state's volunteer adopt-a-highway program is contributed on an annual basis.

Yet despite these measures, "You still see litter and it's still a problem," Armstrong said.

Locally, the city of Jackson has a full-time employee dedicated to running the city's street sweeper. The city street crews pick up trash as needed. They are called out two to three times a week to pick up large items like concrete blocks that have fallen out of pickup trucks. The city also has a volunteer day for cleaning up the parks.

The city of Cape Girardeau is paying inmates a $5 per-hour credit for every hour they work and that money will go toward the inmates' fines. The city also runs two street sweepers almost daily. While the street sweeper does pick up litter, public works director Tim Gramling said it is mainly intended to protect the quality of water that empties into streams. The sweeper swept 9,896 miles of gutters in 2004.

Beyond the cost of cleaning up and beyond the aesthetic damage, the litter also hurts wildlife. Plastic six-pack rings have been known to deform turtle shells, for instance.

But as the cost and environmental problems pile up, there appear to be no immediate solutions to the problem.

Experts say the problem is a behavioral one, a universal attitude that will take perhaps years to change.

Currently, at least locally and statewide, most of the weapons of trash reduction come in the form of volunteers.

Forty-four individuals or groups have sponsored highways in the state's adopt-a-highway program in Cape Girardeau County. Individuals and groups who sign up for this program have vowed to pick up trash along their adopted road four times per year, said Mark Aufdenberg, the local adopt-a-highway coordinator for MoDOT. Some are good about keeping their commitment, Aufdenberg said. Others are not.

Those 44 sponsors have adopted 75.5 miles of highway in the county. Others have worked with the public works department and have sponsored streets in city limits.

But considering there are 285 miles of streets in Cape Girardeau, 90 miles in Jackson, 420 miles of county roads and 318 miles of state highways and interstates in Cape Girardeau County, only a small fraction of the roadways are adopted.

Cape Girardeau Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle said no local governmental agency is responsible for picking up trash. Unless the trash is considered a health problem, that means it's the property owner's responsibility to pick up trash that motorists have thrown on their property.

Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones doesn't think the littering problem is as bad as it used to be in the county. But, he said, county road crews do pick up large trash items, like dumped furniture, from the county's right of way from time to time. He said county inmates were once used to help clean up roadside and park litter, but it became too expensive to supervise and the county discontinued the program.

As far as proactive measures, the region and state are doing little to address the issue in the way of campaigns. Anti-litter campaigns were part of the human conscience decades ago with Lady Bird Johnson's "Keep America Beautiful" ads, the tearful American Indian images and the "Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute" campaigns.

MoDOT and the Missouri Department of Conservation kicked off a No More Trash campaign two years ago which sponsors contests geared toward children and teens. The No More Trash program is sponsoring a video ad contest in which a participant can win a $200 prize. The No More Trash program will begin a month-long Trash Bash in April.

But overall, Armstrong said, the program isn't well funded and can only do so much. Between the MDC and MoDOT, she said the state is spending roughly $80,000 per year on the No More Trash program.

"We don't have the money to have air time," Armstrong said. "Everybody's dealing with this. It's a real frustrating problem everywhere."

bmiller@semissourian.com

243-6635