Beautiful

Dirt Roads, Dumping & Dead Ends

by Marj Law,

Keep Wakulla County Beautiful

At the Keep Wakulla County Beautiful(KWCB) office, we receive an average of 4 calls each week about trash along the sides of the road. We have discovered that trash is most likely to be found along dirt roads, dead ends, and stop signs.

This week, we received a call from a resident who wanted to share his amazement about littering he witnessed. He told us he saw 2 young men in a black Chevy truck with a Florida State University tag empting trash on to the roadside. He could not believe they did so when it was obvious someone was observing.

“Can we do something about this?” he asked.

“What would you think might work?” I countered.

“How about placing ‘no dumping’ signs at this spot?” he wondered.

I thought about that for a moment.

“Are you saying that you believe these young men would not have emptied the litter from their truck if signs had been erected at that spot? Would that have worked?” I asked.

Now he thought for a moment.

“No, I don’t think it would,” he mused. “If they had the nerve to dump when they knew someone was watching, a sign wouldn’t have done any good.”

The bottom line is: what actually works to reduce litter?

So far, we have discovered only one way to reduce litter in Wakulla County, and it’s the same throughout the world. The only way to lessen the amount of litter which is tossed out car windows, allowed to fall from truck beds, or calculatedly dumped from vehicles, is to create an awareness that litter is everybody’s responsibility.

We do this by joining Sheriff Harvey in Neighborhood Watch programs where we begin a Neighborhood Watch organization with a cleanup. One such event is coming soon in Rainbow Acres.

We organize large numbers of people in large cleanup events like the recent Coastal Cleanup and during the Great American Cleanup in the spring.

KWCB’s Adopt a Road program invites our residents to “adopt” a 2-mile section of road. Participants clean “their” road 4 times each year.

We talk to students in our local schools, and show them pictures of local people taking it upon themselves to pick up trash. We bring awareness to the fact that people do litter, and begin to work on young people’s perceptions of how they will act in their lives to reduce litter.

We support the Sheriff’s Litter Control Unit as they supervise prisoner volunteers daily to pick up trash from our county and state roads, and from our parks and public places.

We assist our commissioners and Veolia Water Systems at Household Hazardous Waste days in Wakulla County, to make sure that these wastes are disposed of in the safest manner possible. These Hazardous Waste days occur about twice each year, and you’ll see us there at the coming one on October 23rd.

We have been invited to write here, in The Wakulla News, and in the Wakulla Area Times to keep residents informed about our local cleanup events and to maintain the issue of litter in front of us all.

We’ll speak at meetings of local organizations about our trash reduction and our beautification programs.

We routinely request assistance from Capt. Ron Huddleston and LT. Mike Stewart and the NJROTC cadets. Big litter problems are quickly reduced when organized young people put their muscle and will into them.

We send out newsletters describing our programs and their progress. We let our residents know who is keeping Wakulla County beautiful, and who sponsors our programs providing the backbone of KWCB.

We record volunteer hours and donations given to our organization. We report to Keep America Beautiful. They hope to see a $1 to $4 ratio of grant funding to “in kind volunteer hours and donations. Our ratio is about $1 to $16.

People like the gentleman who called about the illegal dumping are the type of people who participate in our many programs. They know that accepting personal responsibility for their own litter and for that of other people is the only successful way to reduce the problem of littering in our world.