Litter sends $4.1 million down the chute
CINCINNATI — Ah, the open road. Sunshine. The wind in your hair. Miles and miles of — garbage.
Every year, the Ohio Department of Transportation picks up heaps and heaps of trash from the side of the road. In 2018, it was more than 396,000 trash bags full. And that’s just from interstates and U.S. routes outside of municipalities and cities.
It’s soggy cigarette cartons, empty Windex bottles, fast-food wrappers, chunks of Styrofoam, used straws, dirty diapers. “Pretty much anything you can think of, you’ll see it out here,” said Mitchel Horne, a 28-year-old highway technician who spent a recent 90-degree afternoon picking up trash with his ODOT crew.
Horne was carrying a bright orange, 40-gallon trash bag, which he usually fills up in about half an hour or so, he said. It’s routine to come across drug needles, purses that have been rifled through and tossed aside and “trucker bombs,” which are soda bottles filled with urine.
To put the 396,000 bags in perspective, it took state employees, inmates and Adopt A Highway volunteers more than 157,000 hours to collect all that garbage in 2018.
And it cost Ohio taxpayers $4.1 million.
“It’s a shame that ODOT has to spend as much time and money as it does picking up other people’s trash,” said spokesman Matt Bruning.
Bruning points to ODOT’S Safe Routes to School program, which also gets about $4 million a year.
“We could double that if we didn’t have to pick up litter,” he said. “Things like that just show how frustrating the problem is.”
ODOT keeps a surprisingly meticulous account of its trash, broken down by county, bags collected, time and money spent, and who does the work.
Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, is the trashiest of the state’s 88 counties — or, perhaps it’s the cleanest, depending on how you look at it. ODOT collected more than 44,700 bags of trash from Cuyahoga County in 2018 alone. It cost more than half a million dollars.
Brian Cunningham, a public information officer for ODOT, said it’s amazing what people will just leave on the side of the road. Tires. Bumpers. Couches. Refrigerators. Toilets.
“These guys could be out fixing guardrail or potholes,” Cunningham said, gesturing to Horne’s crew. “But we have to deploy folks across the state to pick up other people’s junk.”