Litter clean-up ideas offered

Daren Shumate of the Parklawn community is tired of picking up trash from the ball fields his children use and around schoolyards and along roadways. He told a group of community leaders at a meeting in Mason District Supervisor Penny Gross’ office March 27 that he regularly fills up six bags of trash on a three-mile walk. In one particularly disgusting incident, he actually found human waste in the dugout where he son plays baseball.

Shumate has noticed that about 80 percent of the trash seems to be from places like MacDonald’s and 7-11s. “If D.C. can tax plastic bags, why can’t we tax takeout? That would encourage people to be responsible,” he says. He would also like to see the reinstatement of bottle deposits and even a ban on bottled water. [Actually bottled water not only adds to the litter problem, it’s a scourge on the environment. It makes no sense to waste energy and resources on packaging and transporting bottles of water when we have access to clean, safe tap water.]

Shumate also cited old issues of the Examiner littering the area and asked whether the county could remove newspaper boxes. That brought up some old memories for Gross, who described how several years ago the Annandale revitalization committee got an okay from VDOT to remove newspaper boxes. A newspaper publisher complained to the attorney general, who determined it was a free speech issue and ordered the boxes to be reinstalled.

Gross said the day laborers who congregate in Culmore and Annandale waiting for jobs have been doing a much better job picking up trash, thanks to the efforts of the Virginia Justice Center and Tenants and Workers United, advocacy groups working on their behalf.

“Is there any way to force people to pick up litter in front of their own house?” Shumate asked. There is a property maintenance code to address blight, but a few newspapers in the driveway aren’t enough to trigger county action, Gross said. It’s more of an outreach issue to get people to take civic responsibility to care for their own property.

People concerned with litter build-up might want to contact the Clean Fairfax Council, which manages the Adopt-A-Spot program aimed at getting community groups to take responsibility for cleaning up trouble spots. You can also fill out a form on the council website to report a litterer. According to the council, anyone convicted of littering can be fined $1,000 and sentenced to up a year in jail. Virginia spends about $5 million a year on litter clean up.