Dirty Sidewalks

We've been traveling to the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia several times a year over the past several years since Katie and Todd bought a house there. We walk around their beautiful neighborhood a lot and one of the things I've noticed is the amount of trash on the sidewalks, on lawns and in the streets.

I was wondering why there was so much trash everywhere. We just don't see a mess like that on Buffalo streets even in the poorer neighborhoods. It didn't take long to realize the problem was the city trash collection. It is total mayhem on trash day in Philly. Everything goes out on the sidewalk in a big pile. Large trash cans are overflowing, bags are left open and scattered about, recycled cans are piled in open cardboard boxes and people need to drag all their stuff to the curb. Then the wind blows. Every trash day there is trash blowing around all over everywhere. When the city trash trucks come down a street they leave a trail of trash on the street which ends up on people's lawns and all over the sidewalks.

I've traveled about to other Philly neighborhoods and the same thing seems to happen on trash day. The city gets trashed every week. There are some people littering but that is nothing like the trash pickup problem.

Buffalo has city provided tote containers on wheels in two sizes for each home. There is also another similar tote for recycle materials. Not only does the totes keep the trash from getting all over the sidewalks they also are very useful as a rat deterrence. Oversized trash put out at anytime is also a problem.

The trash in Philly reminds me of what it was like living there so many years ago before there was the anti-litter movement. People just dropped their trash everywhere back then. Candy wrappers, fast food bags, cigarette packs, anything at all was just dropped on the ground as they were walking down the streets. People also used to constantly throw trash out the window while driving down a highway or city street. It was all so very common until a national anti-litter campaign.

Apparently after World War II American companies began a campaign to continue manufacturing at their profit making wartime capacity and the result was a huge increase in consumer spending and consumption. All of these new consumer goods were in packaging that needed to be thrown out after use. The result was lots of garbage and pollution. Approximately one third of all trash in the world comes from consumer packaging.

Eventually a Keep America Beautiful campaign which really took off in the early years of the environmental movement in the 1970's. We saw lots of TV commercials about trash on the highways and littering in our neighborhoods. It was a very gradual process but things slowly got better over the next few decades. Part of that process was the recycling movement and the redemption of bottles.

Becky and I used to go to New York City a lot in the 70's and 80's and it was a mess. There was trash everywhere including cans and bottles. Philadelphia was any better back then. Urban messes. Things got better in NYC when the state passed their bottle laws. It made a big difference.

When I was walking around Mt Airy recently I was surprised by the number of bottles and cans laying on the sidewalks. They are left there because there is no incentive to collect them for cash like in New York. The other problem of course in Philadelphia is the haphazard trash collection by the city mentioned above. I significant percentage of any weeks trash ends up on the ground. It's obvious when you look around after trash pickup.

Trash collection problems in Philly have gotten much worse because of the pandemic. We did not see much of an issue in Buffalo. Our trash has always been collected in a timely manner and without a lot of debris being left on the streets.

So Philadelphia needs to implement bottle and can deposit like NY to create an incentive to keep them off the streets and sidewalks. The city also needs to have a program for aggressive recycling that includes mobile bins with lids and the same type of bins for trash that would help with rat problems and keep wind blown trash off the streets. 

The other issue is dog dirt on the sidewalks but that's another story.