Trash Talk – What Are The Causes And Solutions Of Litter In Charlestown

In late 2018, Warren Schwartz came to the Town Council with the idea of a community litter pick up day. On April 27, 2019, the town followed through on Warren’s idea and organized the Community Roadside Litter Pick-Up Day. This was meant to be repeated every year, but was cancelled in 2020 because of the lock down last spring for the COVID-19 pandemic. We are hoping that enough people will have been vaccinated by this spring that we could have another Community Roadside Litter Pick-Up Day this year.

There is a small group of people in our community, or those driving through Charlestown, who throw their drink and food containers out of their car windows. And there are others who carelessly let it blow out of their pickups on the way to the transfer station. The result is an accumulation of litter along the roadsides. There have been many solutions proposed over the years, including a state wide refundable bottle and can deposit. We tried for years, but the “Bottle Bill” never passed the legislature and the trash still accumulates on our roads. The Town’s Department of Public Works (DPW) cuts vegetation along the roads and some litter gets removed in that process, but that is no more than once a year, and the DPW does not have staff available to walk all our town roads picking up after those who carelessly litter.

There are many of you who already pick up roadside litter as you take an afternoon walk or you may continuously clean the litter tossed in front of your property. Community litter pick up days are a chance to get more people involved and raise awareness about this issue, but is there more we could do?

What Are The Sources – And Are There Solutions?

Accidental Littering
Some of the litter on Old Coach Road and other roads leading to the transfer station might be blowing or bouncing out of pickup trucks on their way to the “dump”. Make sure your bags or cans are closed and secured when you drive to the Charlestown Residential Collection Center on Sand Hill Road. Accidental littering is still a crime and technically is punishable by the same fines as intentional littering.

Nips
“Nips” are a product designed to break two laws: driving while drinking and littering. “Nips” are the miniature liquor bottles that in the past you got on an airplane or in a hotel room, but they are now sold directly to consumers in liquor stores. They allow the drinker to get a shot of hard liquor while operating a vehicle and then toss the container so they don’t have any incriminating open alcohol container in their vehicle. Some of the roads in Charlestown are loaded with these tiny empty bottles. Chelsea Massachusetts passed a ban on “nip” liquor bottles in 2018. Although the purpose was to reduce litter, an interesting effect was that after one year public drunkenness diminished, alcohol-related ambulance responses were way down, and there was a reduction in the number of people taken into protective custody for alcohol intoxication. Local officials say the litter caused by discarded nip bottles largely disappeared. Attempts to ban nips in other Massachusetts towns, including Bourne, Randolph, Yarmouth, and Barnstable, all failed under pressure from the liquor industry.

Beer, Soda, And Other Beverage Containers
Empty beer cans, like empty nips, may make the inebriated vehicle operator nervous about a possible traffic stop and so the cans go flying. Non-alcoholic containers are thrown perhaps to keep the driver’s vehicle interiors clean. Their cars are clean, but the roadsides are a mess.

Fast Food
Litter is a frequent topic on social media and many people report Dunkin Donuts, McDonald’s, and other fast food packaging along our roads. There are no McDonald’s in Charlestown so a town wide education program likely wouldn’t reach those customers, but could we engage these franchise owners to better educate their own patrons and perhaps step in to help us with roadside clean ups?

Plastic Shopping Bags
Plastic bags blow along our roads and hang from trees, but they also end up in the ocean and other waterways where they can cause real harm. Before the pandemic, many local towns had banned plastic shopping bags and the legislature seemed poised to pass a statewide ban. But these efforts to reduce plastic bag waste were suspended with the pandemic as restaurants moved to mostly take out and there was a fear that the virus might survive on reusable cloth bags that shoppers brought to grocery stores. Once the pandemic is behind us, we’ll need to support the statewide ban on single use plastic bags.

Balloons
The outdoor release of balloons can pose a threat to wildlife and the environment, often ending up in waterways, where animals are attracted by their bright color and mistake them for food, which can cause injury or death to the animal. Sea turtles, dolphins, whales, fish and birds have been reported with balloons in their stomachs and entangled in ribbons and strings, causing death. There are two types of balloons in general use – latex and Mylar. Although latex balloons are considered biodegradable, this will take anywhere from 6 months to 4 years to decompose and they can wreak a lot of havoc before they do. The House Judiciary Committee is holding for further study legislation introduced by Rep. Susan Donovan of Portsmouth that bans the intentional release of balloons into the air. This was supported by the Charlestown Town Council last year. “Holding for further study” usually means it didn’t have the support of leadership. We’ll see if this changes in the new session.

Cigarette Butts Are Toxic To The Environment
Cigarettes are the most littered item on earth. Disposing of cigarettes on the ground or out of a car is so common that 75 percent of smokers report doing it. Although they are small, discarded cigarette butts do leach toxic chemicals such as arsenic and lead (to name just a few) into the environment and can contaminate water. The toxic chemicals can poison fish, as well as animals who eat the cigarette butts. What is left are the filters. Ninety-eight percent of cigarette filters are made of plastic fibers. Although cigarettes don’t break down naturally, they can gradually decompose depending on environmental conditions like the rain and sun. Estimates on the time it takes vary, but a recent study found that a cigarette butt was only about 38 percent decomposed after two years. If you are a smoker, consider quitting, but in any case, please keep your butts and empty packs and wrappers out of the environment where they can harm other creatures.

Trashing Our Wild And Scenic River
One of the many people who voluntarily pick up trash has noted that there is a runoff area built into the road on Rt. 91 near the John (Jay) Cronan River Access. She picked up a full trash bag in that one spot in minutes. All the trash washes off the road down hill into the swampy woods edging the river and from there ends up in the river. She has suggested the state put netting on the slope to catch this. There are other areas where the roads cross streams and litter is being injected into waterways.

It Can Be Really Gross
A homeowner along Worden’s Pond Road has noted that they see plastic bottles filled with urine among the roadside litter. These could be the same people throwing lots of beer cans on the roadside or it could be laborers working in the area without bathroom breaks. We don’t know of any law that prohibits peeing in a bottle, but throwing it on the roadside is illegal. Contractors whose crews work without port-a-johns or other opportunities for breaks should educate their workers on how to properly dispose of these and other trash – or they could give them a long enough break to get to a bathroom.

What Is The Law?
Rhode Island General Laws 37-15 and 2-15-7 speak to litter control.
§ 37-15-7. Penalties.
(a) Any person convicted of a first violation of this chapter shall, except where a penalty is specifically set forth, be subject to a fine of not less than eighty-five dollars ($85.00), nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000). In addition to, or in lieu of, the fine imposed hereunder, the person so convicted may be ordered to pick up litter for not less than two (2), nor more than twenty-five (25), hours.

(b) Any person convicted of a second or subsequent violation of this chapter shall, except where a penalty is specifically set forth, be subject to a fine of not less than three hundred dollars ($300), nor more than five thousand dollars ($5,000). In addition to, or in lieu of, the fine imposed upon a second or subsequent violation of this chapter, the person so convicted may be ordered to pick up litter for not less than four (4), nor more than fifty (50), hours.

Many of Charlestown’s roads have signs warning that these laws are strictly enforced. A barrier to enforcement may be that litterers wait until they have no surrounding traffic to pitch their trash – they simply are rarely caught in the act.

Per the Charlestown Zoning Ordinance, agreements about litter can be part of the Special Use Permit for a drive-in use in Charlestown. Any drive-in use which has been granted and approved by the Zoning Board of Review by way of a special use permit and is cited for a repeated violation of any of the provisions of this ordinance or conditions placed on the approval of a special use permit, including but not limited provisions against litter, noise, or air-pollution, can have said drive-in use revoked upon reasonable notice and opportunity to be heard.

Should The Businesses Who Produce The Litter Be Held Responsible?
As noted above, responsibility is built in to the drive-in use permit in Charlestown. Some of the litter found along the roads have business logos on them. Certainly these businesses should be engaged in educating their patrons. Should they also help in cleaning up our roads? The state requires every food and beverage selling business to buy a litter control permit as part of its state tax license. We aren’t aware that this has any effect.

There’s An App For That
Litterati is a phone app that creates a database of litter types and locations. You can download the app from the App Store or Google Play. Once you have the app, before disposing of your find, you photograph a piece of litter and upload through the app and then add tags for type, material and brand. So for example if you found an empty can of Pepsi, you would use tags such as “can, aluminum, and Pepsi” or “nip, plastic, and Bacardi” for a nip bottle. Some roads in Charlestown have so many nips and beer cans it seems it might take weeks to photograph each piece – but the data would be great to have. The app keeps track of location and creates a map of litter.

People in Charlestown are already using this app and contributing to the data, we’d be interested to hear of their experience. You can see the data for Charlestown at https://opendata.litterati.org/.

Eloquent Writing About Litter
This excellent piece, “Nips by the roadside a littering epidemic“, by local writer Betty Cotter was published in the Providence Journal one year ago and is worth a read. Nothing has changed in the year since it was written, but we shouldn’t give up hope – with enough positive voices we may discover solutions.

How To Dispose Without Getting Charged $
If you have a permit to use the Charlestown Transfer Station, you can take recyclables there for free and much of the roadside litter are recyclable beverage containers. But for roadside litter that can’t be recycled, the Good Samaritan is left with having to pay for disposal of the litter they picked up. For people who have garbage pick up, litter can be added to your own recyclables and garbage, but you may be limited to how many containers you can have per week.

For a neighborhood wide pick up day you can contact the Charlestown Department of Public Works in advance to arrange a pick up location for what you collect. You can contact DPW at publicwrks@charlestownri.org or (401) 364-1230.

Allowing the transfer station to be open to all for recycling would be great. There may be a logistical reason why it is not. We intend to ask that question and see if there is a solution.

We’d like to hear ideas for how the good citizen who picks up roadside litter can dispose of that litter without having to pay.

Look for a future notice of “Clean-up Charlestown Day“
This is tentatively scheduled for April 17. Details to follow.

We’d Love To Hear Your Ideas
Please tell us about the types of litter you find and what you think the sources and solutions are and any other “trash talk” you’d like to share.

---

The banner image is trash picked up by Frances Topping in just one of her daily walks along Old Coach Road. Thanks to Frances for the image and for her work for many years to pick up litter along Old Coach and other nearby roads.

---

Solutions Suggested By Readers (but not as post comments)

1. Seek reimbursement from the state for the litter pick up expense through the litter control tax which is imposed by the state, but currently goes into the general fund.
2. Impose a local litter tax on all businesses that provide take out food or drink.
   
3. Follow the lead of Chelsea Massachusetts and ban nip liquor bottles.