Ohioans joined 193 countries and more than a billion people in celebrating Earth Day last weekend. We also joined everyone in reckoning with our litter problem.
Even though 81% of Ohioans know littering is illegal (not to mention especially lazy and wrong), according to ODOT, 42% of Ohioans have littered in the past month. More than two in five Ohio residents have tossed trash within the last 30 days.
The department, as it has in years past, used Earth Day weekend for volunteer cleanup efforts and a chance to remind everyone that the McDonald’s bag you tossed out of your car window on I-271 doesn’t magically disappear but needs to be picked up by someone.
To put some numbers behind the problem: ODOT collects an estimated 400,000 bags of trash every year, to the tune of roughly $4 million.
The economic cost is just part of the sad equation. Litter pollutes waterways, kills wildlife and damages soil. Plastic, of course, sits around forever.
And it’s not just our roads.
Last week, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration recommended allocating more than $8 million in federal funding to litter reduction and conservation in Ohio.
“Ohio’s recommended projects will protect habitat along the Chagrin River, restore the shoreline and marshes along Sandusky Bay, and remove trash and debris from Lake Erie,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D in a statement. “NOAA is proud to recommend and support such projects, which recognize that healthy ecosystems offer valuable benefits to people and are examples of how together we can build healthier and more resilient coastlines and coastal communities.”
Nearly $600,000 of that money is dedicated to trash management in two projects. The first project, Plastic-Free Cleveland, aims to develop a plastic-free coalition in the Cleveland area.
The second, Beach and On-water Trash Trapping Tech Team for Lake Erie, or BOTTTTLE, “will offer paid workforce development opportunities to underserved and underrepresented youth in the greater Cleveland area to assist in the creation of training resources for two newly implemented trash removal devices that support cleanup efforts on beaches, marinas, inland waterways and ports in Ohio,” according to NOAA.
Another way Ohioans can help keep the state healthy and beautiful is by volunteering in groups with ODOT’s Adopt-A-Highway program. Participating groups commit to cleaning their designated stretch of highway at least four times a year.
But the simplest thing Ohioans can do is just stop littering. If trash isn’t tossed into nature, it doesn’t have to be picked up.
This has been the latest in an occasional Scene series in which we ask doofuses to stop doing dumb things. Previous installments below.
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This article appears in Apr 19 – May 3, 2023.