Have you ever wondered how much litter is on one NYC block? If you knew, do you think there’s anything useful you could do with that information? It’s widely known that NYC streets are filthy, but how do we improve the situation? A group of us recently got our hands dirty cleaning up a block of Bushwick in NYC. We even did a litter audit to see what kinds of items get littered most. This blog post is all about how that went, and what we learned. The litter situation isn’t a pretty picture, but there is a lot you can do about it.
Sustainability is a Team Effort
First things first, who got together for the event? It takes a lot of people and planning for a multi-faceted event like this one, so let me introduce all the main participants.
Clean Bushwick Initiative
The Clean Bushwick Initiative is a civic non-profit and led the clean-up portion. They’re no strangers to this kind of work. They’ve been good stewards of Bushwick for 6 years doing dozens of street clean-ups in that time! It was great to have the Clean Bushwick Initiative there running the clean-up portion of this event.
EcoRate
EcoRate also joined in. Members of our Coffee & Sustainability meetup group joined the Clean Bushwick Initiative volunteers for the clean-up. Our meetups are usually laid-back conversations about sustainability at NYC cafes with the best ecorating on our app. It was awesome to see some of our members roll up their sleeves to do some tougher environmental work.
From reading about other litter audits, I already knew that food and drink containers usually make up the majority of litter by weight. But I wanted to get some NYC-specific stats. So I did the trash audit myself, and I’ll share the gruesome details about it in just a moment. We had a great turnout at the event so I still need to finish introducing the participants!
Hila the Killa
Hila the Killa kicked off the event for us with a live performance of some eco-raps. If you haven’t seen her perform yet you’re missing out! Luckily she’s got you covered. You can watch this “A day with Hila the Killa” video to get a taste of what she’s all about.
Climate action involves a lot of dry stuff like life cycle analysis and calculating carbon footprints. So it’s really refreshing to see Hila approach everything with so much energy and excitement.
Ornithology Jazz Club
For a mobile event like a street clean-up, it’s great to have a home base. The Ornithology Jazz Club was our rallying point. We gathered at their jazz club before the event, and they welcomed us afterwards with live jazz and cocktails. Since we were cleaning up their block, it was wonderful to see how much they appreciated and supported the event. EcoRate doesn’t do ratings for jazz clubs yet, but when we get to it I’m sure Ornithology will be top draw. Their active support of this clean-up shows how much they value their community. That kind of community engagement manifests itself in myriad ways. If you’ve never been to Ornithology, check it out for yourself.
Alegría Vegana
Finally, Alegría Vegana served a vegan menu at the jazz club after the clean-up. This rounded out the day’s events and gave the volunteers one more thing to look forward to after the pick-up.
The combination of all the different groups here represented so many aspects of what it means to be sustainable. I always say that sustainability is for everyone, so it was nice to see such a wide range of groups and people making this whole event work.
Clean-up & Litter Audit
We walked around the block northwest of the Ornithology Jazz Club with gloves, trash bags, grabbers, and brooms. We went up Suydam St., across Bushwick Ave., back down Willoughby Ave., and came full circle going down Broadway Ave. Some other people thanked us as they walked by in the street. A street clean-up’s visibility is a big part of its effectiveness. One aspect of this is the idea is that people are less likely to litter when they don’t see any trash in the street.
Even more important is the impact a street clean-up has on the volunteers. That might sound like preaching to the choir, but there are a lot of new faces at most clean-ups. Even if you weren’t a litterbug before, participating in a clean-up makes you re-evaluate your relationship with consumption and waste. How is it even possible to find so much trash on one block? Does our society normalize and even incentivize the constant generation of trash? Yes, yes it does. Doing a street clean-up is a great way of coming to this realization. This article from the UN Environment Program is a great run-down of the benefits of doing clean-ups including their effects on the volunteers.
Street Clean-up
Now let’s dig into the dirty details of the event. Our group of about 20 volunteers spent roughly 45 minutes doing the clean-up. Together we filled 15 bags with 165 pounds of trash, not including some of the bottles and things we were able to recycle. EcoRate is on a mission to prevent unnecessary cafe waste, so what I really wanted to know was how much of this was drink containers? I found out by doing a litter audit of one of the average-looking bags.
Litter Audit
If you’ve never done a trash audit before, it’s a great thing to try at home. It’s a good way take stock of the types of things you throw away most so that you can try to find a zero waste alternative for whatever it is. Pro tip: try to start composting before you do a trash audit. If there’s no food waste in your trash it’s much easier to do the audit.
The bag I audited weighed 11.1 pounds. Cigarette butts were the most common item by count. This was expected because they’re the most commonly littered item in the world. Digging through the bag, the majority of the weight and volume was taken up by single-use food and beverage containers. I found 56 discarded drink containers which weighed 3.3 pounds (~30% of the weight). Some of these would have been recyclable if they weren’t so dirty. Recently it came out that only 5% of plastic is recycled in the United States. An unwieldy portion of the remaining 95% litters our streets. The problem of single-use items becoming litter has been known for decades, so at this point our dependence on plastic is problematic *by design*. You can read all about the fundamental issues with plastic recycling here.
Litter Overview
I mentioned about a third was discarded drink containers. Roughly another third of the waste was individual food containers. Then there were a fair number of bulk grocery store boxes and bags. Sprinkle in a couple of garments, a handful of majorly toxic items like batteries and lighters, and of course cigarette butts beyond number. In all, I would say about 65% of the waste we found was single-use food and drink items and another 15-20% was extra grocery store packaging. If you think about it, what other trash are people going to be walking around with in the street? Serving so much of our food and drinks in single-use containers is planning to litter. You’re welcome to dig up the 165 pounds of trash from our clean-up off-gassing in a landfill and see for yourself.
Hundreds of Single-use Cups
Extrapolating by weight, the 56 drink containers from the 11.1 pound bag I audited suggest that there were about 832 drink containers in our whole trash haul. 832… on one block! And that’s despite the fact that Brooklyn Whiskers, the cafe next-door to the Ornithology Jazz Club, is pretty solidly low-waste. Check out an area with more Starbucks and Dunkin’s and you’re likely to find way more littered cups.
Solutions
Don’t let any of this get you down. There’s actually quite a lot we can do about our rampant waste problem.
Clean-up Groups
For starters, participate in a neighborhood clean-up. The Clean Bushwick Initiative is great, and there are tons of others too. Just to name a few, in NYC you also have:
- Malcolm X Boulevard Beautification Group
- Green and Blue Eco Care (in East Harlem)
- Bay Ridge Environmental Group
… and lots of others too. If you can’t find one in your area, you can apply for a $500 Love Your Block grant to help you start your own clean-ups.
Waste Prevention
Even better than picking up litter, we want to *prevent* waste from being created. The Clean Bushwick initiative is great on this point in that they stress waste education. They always encourage people to rethink their habits as part of their clean-up events.
Waste prevention is also what EcoRate is all about. EcoRate is a free sustainability ratings app. So try letting EcoRate help you find a low-waste cafe and leave a sustainability review of the cafes you go to as well. That way we’ll be able to give the next person better-informed sustainability recommendations. Supporting eco-friendly cafes is a powerful way to assert your environmental values, and have a positive impact that goes well beyond reducing your own waste.
Waste Prevention Policy
Supporting local environmental policy initiatives can have a lot of impact too. In NYC, there is solid support for the skip the stuff bill which requires all the extra “stuff” (utensils, sauces, napkins, etc.) be given by request only. Even more impactful are extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws, and ordinances requiring that all dine-in orders be served with reusables only. Your city may very well be considering laws like these, and if it isn’t, you can be the one to suggest them. We can’t count on non-existent future technology to address our environmental problems when simple and effective solutions are available.
Join Us
If you want to join EcoRate and the Clean Bushwick Initiative, we’d love to have you at our next event. It won’t be a street clean-up or litter audit, but waste prevention will be the focus. Stay tuned to our social media and newsletter to find out more. Your help means the world to us 🌎🌍🌏
