‘We only have one planet’
To lead by example, this teacher began picking up litter near Stamford home
STAMFORD — Even on a beautiful spring day, the only thing Jessica Hanley saw was trash.
In the bushes in front of her home, in the storm drains, caught in the fence at St. Mary’s Church — Hanley spotted litter everywhere on her Shippan Avenue block. So early in the pandemic, Hanley made a simple resolution.
“Nobody’s going to clean this up,” she remembered telling her boyfriend, “so I’m going to clean this up.”
Hanley admits her crusade was born primarily out of boredom early on in the pandemic. The 30-year-old Greenwich elementary school teacher wanted to get her steps in for the day. She’d go on meandering walks through the neighborhood to break up her afternoons, noticing trash as she moved along.
After some months, Hanley started going out with nylon gloves — she’d acquired them because of COVID — and picked trash out of the roads. Pickings are typically pretty standards; she finds endless cigarette butts, plastic coffee cups, paper, and discarded cans mostly.
Litter prevention organization Keep America Beautiful found in 2009 that cigarette butts make up the bulk of America’s litter. Their research indicated that, of the 51.2 billion pieces of litter on roadways nationwide, tobacco products make up 38 percent. Paper debris
“Our trash travels. Our PPE travels. When we drop it on the ground, or it flies off our ear and lands in a parking lot, it doesn’t stay there.” Anthony Allen, of Save the Sound, speaking to NBC Connecticut
and plastic trailed behind substantially, making up 22 percent and 19 percent of litter, respectively.
However, the small stuff is only the tip of the iceberg for Hanley. She has picked up massive stuffed animals, broken television sets, and entire couch cushions with the stuffing ripped out. The laundry list of things people dump on the roads is endless.
But overall, there is less litter in the United States now than there was in decades past. Keep America Beautiful’s research points to a substantial decline in littering since the late 1960s. From 1969 to 2009, the overall quantity of litter tanked by 69 percent, with a critical caveat: In that same time frame, the amount of plastic litter increased by 165 percent.
Experts widely consider plastic litter to be the most dangerous kind. Most plastics never biodegrade, meaning bacteria and other organic life cannot break it down. Plastic pieces just become smaller and smaller but never entirely disappear. In coastal communities like Stamford and Greenwich, plastic waste can end up in waterways and ultimately destroy wildlife.
Even the pandemic has made its mark on litter.
Keep America Beautiful counted 24 billion pieces of litter alongside highways, and 26 billion pieces of litter along waterways in 2020, according to Time Magazine. While the nonprofit counted less litter in public spaces than in 2009, individual cities have reported significant increases in both trash and litter, with more people producing more garbage at home.
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection even issued a reminder last summer when people fled to parks for a reprieve from the indoors and brought all their garbage with them. Personal protective equipment has become a staple of litter too. Masks and disposable gloves, like the ones Hanley once used for her clean-ups, end up on sidewalks, in front lawns, on beaches.
“Our trash travels. Our PPE travels,” Anthony Allen of Save the Sound recently told NBC Connecticut. “When we drop it on the ground, or it flies off our ear and lands in a parking lot, it doesn’t stay there.”
Hanley feels overwhelmed by the amount of garbage she sees everywhere, even just on her street.
“Honestly, there’s so much trash; the one street keeps me busy,” Hanley said. “I can’t even believe how much trash is just on one little, tiny block.
She can spend hours walking up and down her block, picking up pieces small and large. In October, she bought specialty tools for her cleanups. Of all the gear, her favorite is a massive, orange pincer especially good at picking up the cigarette butts that drive her crazy. She calls it “the big tweezer.”
The fervor for environmentalism has picked up among her students at North Mianus School in Greenwich. While greeting her students at the school doors on some days, Hanley has taken to scouring for litter there. She even keeps an extra set of tools in her car, just in case she needs them.
For Earth Day, she plans on doing a trash pickup with her students at North Mianus, just to make them aware of how pervasive litter is.
“You don’t really notice it unless someone says ‘do you ever realize how much trash there is,’ ” Hanley said. As an educator, she thinks it’s essential for her students to start noticing how people treat the world around them, one piece of garbage at a time.
“I teach the kids that we only have one planet, but at the end of the day, I don’t see anyone doing anything,” Hanley said. “I can’t do everything.”
Hanley hopes she won’t have to.