Emmaus student tackles litter problem
We all should be motivated by Olivia Sullivan.
For Earth Day, the Emmaus High School senior recruited 113 volunteers to clean up trash that slobs left behind at Jordan Park in Allentown.
“It was pretty messy there,” Sullivan, 18, of Macungie told me.
That was a polite description based on the litter they found on April 23.
Bottles. Cans. Car tires. A car door. A mattress. Part of a trash can. And cigarette butts, lots and lots of cigarette butts.
“They had just had an Easter egg hunt the weekend before so there was a ton of Easter egg shells,” she said.
When it was all bagged up, the trash weighed about 2,400 pounds. That’s more than a ton of litter.
It’s sad that so much was found in such a small area, but great that so many people cared enough to pick it up.
There, unfortunately, are plenty of opportunities for volunteers to do more.
More than 502 million pieces of trash were found in a survey of litter along Pennsylvania roads in 2018 and 2019. The most common were cigarette butts and plastic bottles.
Sullivan and her crew found trash everywhere at Jordan Park.
It was along the creek. It was in the woods. It was around the pavilions. It was on the baseball fields. It surrounded the basketball courts.
“Even though there was a trash can and recycling right there, a lot of the people who were playing would just throw their bottles right off the side of the court,” Sullivan said.
And I bet the trash can was empty, I told her.
Yep.
“Which is what I thought was ridiculous,” she said. “It was literally not even five feet away from the basketball court.”
Sullivan, who intends to become a veterinarian, has many environmental interests.
She’s also trying to get legislation passed to require boats to have propeller guards to protect marine life.
She should be proud of what she accomplished at Jordan Park. She hoped 30 people would come out. When those spots filled quickly, she raised the cap to 50. She kept hearing from more until there were 113.
Volunteers came from local businesses. They came from schools in Allentown and Whitehall. A gardening shop donated wildflower seeds that Sullivan gave to volunteers to thank them.
Supplies were donated by Amazon, PennDOT and
Keep Nature Wild, an Arizona company that sells clothing made of recycled material and encourages customers to pick up litter in
their communities.
Sullivan does that, too. Every day is Earth Day for her.
She frequently takes walks through her neighborhood, picking up trash along the way. She was doing that when we talked by phone on Monday afternoon. I could hear the cars passing as we talked.
She told me she picks up 30 pounds of trash a week. If everyone would be so motivated, that would put a pretty good dent in Pennsylvania’s litter problem.
The question, of course, is why should the rest of us have to get our hands dirty picking up after the slobs?
There is no excuse for littering. In cities such as Allentown, there are public trash cans located on many street corners.
Parks have them, too. As Sullivan’s experience shows, many people are just too lazy to use them.
People who have trash in their cars can wait until they get home to dump it. But too many prefer to chuck it out the window.
Littering isn’t a victimless crime.
A few years ago, I wrote about the plight of an elderly couple in Upper Macungie Township. Someone had dumped furniture, tires and other junk on their empty lot. They paid a service $600 to clean it up.
Then another degenerate — maybe the same one — dumped sofas and other garbage. The township threatened to fine the couple if it wasn’t cleaned up. After I wrote about their
problem, an Allentown hauling company, Dr. Clutter, generously cleaned up the mess for free. Litter costs all of us.
In 2018, Allentown spent about $2.5 million on litter abatement. That includes street sweeping; picking up trash bags, furniture and other items that are dumped in empty lots and wooded areas; and organizing community cleanups.
Nine of the largest cities in Pennsylvania spent a combined $54.6 million, with the state spending another $13 million.
Thankfully, there are people such as Sullivan who care.