“I’m a real trashy person,” she
teases.
Osbourne and fellow members of the Varina Women’s Club
are regulars on the anti-litter circuit. Four times a year the group
holds an all-day cleanup as part of Henrico County’s beautification
program, where volunteers have adopted 45 roads, 11 schools and five
communities for trash pickup. This year, Osbourne and 1,770 other
volunteers picked up 3,548 bags of trash across the county, says Nancy
Drumheller, coordinator of the Keep Henrico Beautiful
Committee.
But their efforts may be in vain.
Thirty years
after Iron Eyes Cody’s single tear launched a generation of
conservationists, the anti-pollution movement seems to have fallen off
the public radar. Despite three decades of green activism, Americans are
burning more gas, building bigger houses and creating piles of
litter.
Meanwhile, the number of cleanup volunteers across
Virginia is steadily declining, and anti-litter funds are shrinking.
While Drumheller and state officials lavish praise on volunteers
such as Osbourne, their work barely registers a dent in the ongoing
litter cycle. The state doesn’t officially track or study the depth of
Virginia’s trash problem, but cleanup efforts have dipped significantly
in recent years. In 2000, 121,000 volunteers participated in the
Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s cleanup programs,
collecting 210,648 cubic yards of trash. By fiscal 2003, that number had
dropped by nearly 30 percent to 96,000 volunteers picking up 180,649
cubic yards of litter.
The future doesn’t look any brighter. In
the 2004-’06 state budget, Gov. Mark Warner nixed money for anti-litter
marketing and education programs, redirecting about $350,000 of the
approximately $1.7 million from so-called litter taxes to the general
fund to balance the state’s $59 billion budget.
The budget isn’t
official until later this month. But if it passes as expected, the
litter cuts will stymie plans to relaunch a statewide campaign aimed at
increasing participation in cleanup programs — and addressing the
litterbugs themselves. The latest campaign targets single males between
18 and 34 years old, the main culprits of trash tossing.
“Our
research found the message to reach the 18- to 34-year-old is that
litter is harmful to animals,” says Dennis P. Gallagher, chairman of the
Virginia Litter Control and Recycling Fund Advisory Board. Reacting in
focus groups to the impact on animals in the wild, he says, “they were
like, ‘Holy smokes!’”
The campaign will have to wait. Localities
will continue to receive $1.27 million in state grants for various
cleanup efforts, but no one is sure when the marketing and education
funds will be restored.
“We’re all walking around very
carefully,” says Rosemary Byrne, executive director of the Clean Fairfax
Council, which runs one of the biggest volunteer anti-litter programs in
the state. “Many of the programs get just enough money. We will all have
to be a little more cautious when we find out what our grant amounts are
going to be.”
While the litter money seems miniscule in a $59
billion budget, the state contribution is seen as critical. Byrne and
Gallagher describe the $1.7 million in state funds as seed money,
generating between $8 million and $9 million in estimated volunteer time
that taxpayers would otherwise have to pay for. (The standard rate for
cleanup labor, according to DEQ, is $17.97 an hour.)
With a
little financial prodding, there is evidence that anti-litter campaigns
can sometimes move the masses. In late March, Richmond’s first annual
Super City Cleanup netted 6,400 volunteers who spent the day picking up
trash all across the city. The city launched the campaign this year to
raise awareness, but officials expected only a few thousand people to
show up. A similar program in Norfolk, says Bill Farrar, a spokesman for
Richmond’s Public Works Department, nets only about a thousand people
every year.
“For the first time out of the gate, we were
surprised,” he says, adding that the city handed out trash bags and
4,000 litter sticks. The program was started get people to start
thinking about cleaning up their neighborhoods, he adds, something that
seems to have dropped off the public conscience.
“People have
gotten numb to the whole idea of keeping up the environment around
them,” Farrar says. “We’re trying to do things to get people
involved.”
For decades, the anti-litter movement has been
steadily losing steam. Since the first official Earth Day on April 22,
1970, the Green movement has slowly shifted its focus away from
individual activism — it starts with you replacing that aerosol spray
with a roll-on — to a more corporate focus.
Environmentalists
cite the McDonald’s Styrofoam clamshell containers as a case study in
the mid-1980s. After activists failed to move customers to boycott the
Golden Arches — the manufacture of the containers emitted harmful,
ozone-destroying chemicals — activists began working with the company to
make the product greener. In 1989, McDonald’s introduced paperboard
burger boxes as a result.
The shift to corporations, and the
ensuing marketing push by many major companies once targeted as
polluters, has led to a massive marketing push that leads many to
believe the pollution problem isn’t what it used to be. Rick Webb, an
environmental scientist at the University of Virginia, says there is
more wasted energy as a result. For example, electricity consumption is
increasing at a rate of 3 percent a year.
“Nobody seems to be
promoting conservation,” Webb says. “We have lost our moral bearings.
The people who throw litter out onto the roads are basically heathens.
We’re becoming a heathen nation.”
The problem, he says, is a lack
of national leadership. Ever since President Ronald Reagan removed the
solar panels from the White House in the early 1980s, he says there has
been little initiative from Washington to fight pollution.
“Since the current administration has been in office, we’ve been
in sort of this wartime mentality,” Webb says. “And during wartime,
rightly or wrongly, that’s when the largest environmental losses
occur.”
In Virginia, the wartime mentality has a lot to do with
billion-dollar budget deficits. But regardless of the funding, local
cleanup volunteers such as Sis Osbourne, and Bob Brick, a Chesterfield
County resident recently recognized for his “tireless” trash pickup
efforts, it’s not about the money.
For the last 17 years, Brick,
53, has been picking trash around his home on Windsor Road in Chester.
“A one-mile radius of my home always yields an orange bag,” he
says. “I’d like to think that downtown Chester looks a little better
now.” S
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