Litter patrol
My litter patrols are a thing long in the making, and probably a thing that my wife got me started on. One of the inaugural cleanups was some years back on a Martin Luther King, Jr. day. On that trip she and I went and cleaned up around Warren Road Elementary school. Occasionally, on other holidays we would do it as well, but those were rather sporadic.
We have a house on Lake Thurmond in Modoc, South Carolina. We have often picked up debris, bottles and cans (almost always alcohol related) in our cove and along the shore of that lake. Driving back and forth from Augusta, Georgia we travel along Fury’s Ferry road (Hwy 28/221). A lot of people must throw their garbage out as they drive along this road too.
Eventually that garbage began speaking too loudly to me and on Labor Day weekend 2016 my wife and I headed out to do our first highway pickup. While picking up the stuff there I decided I should make a blog post on that pickup. That post went up on September 5th, 2016. It is now early November 2016 and I have massaged that set of posts into the report on 12 cleanups.
Why pickup litter?
I have often thought about that while I pick things up. I think that I enjoy the time by myself. The results can be seen immediately. Some guys like to go hunting, others fishing, and I think that this is a bit like that for me. It gets me out of the house and into the world. Hopefully it has an impact on others who see me out and about getting the stuff up.
I do my best to not focus on why people litter. This is not a mission I have to change everyone’s behavior, and I don’t want to be angry and spiteful out there getting the stuff up. Maybe, a few will be spurred on to do their own cleanups or to not litter in the first place. We’ll see.
How do I do it?
It is not very difficult to do. I usually take along two 5 gallon buckets. One is for recycling type things and the other for household trash. One can just take bags to cleanup and usually there will be plastic grocery bags laying around that can be used to fill up as well.
I like to sort all my things. One of the most time consuming things is the glass. The glass recycling center near my house wants the glass sorted into brown, green and clear (I’ve not figured out where blue glass goes yet). The best time to sort the glass is while picking it up. In my recycle 5 gallon bucket I keep an old painting bucket where I can put the brown shards. I then will tie a bag for green shards and clear shards on the handle.
What do I do with the stuff?
Well, I photograph it and weigh it so that it can be posted on this website. This site I maintain with WordPress. The tables are put together with TablePress, the maps with Google “My Places” and the galleries with EnviraGallery. I just use my Galaxy Note 5 cell phone camera for most of the images. I process them with Adobe Photoshop cc. The HTML pages I use Microsoft Access to build so they go up rather quickly. I have taken some pictures with my Inspire 1 drone, but it is a bit big for what I need to do so I will probably switch to the Mavic Pro.