In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
Sunday, July 02, 2017
Remove Trash Cans From Beaches?
Shall We, the People support removing all trash cans from our beaches?
An idea whose time has come?
Or another noisome nostrum advanced with utter insensitivity to public preferences?
Eliminating a government service?
Sounds vaguely, snootily Republican, not unlike attacking Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare.
Removing all trash cans from parks and beaches would be accompanied by PR campaigns telling people to take their trash home.
Some advocate moving trash cans "as far away from the beach as possible." In Flori-DUH, this idea was tried and rejected in Martin County. In more progressive places it seems to work. Here, you know Bubba will be against it, so why bother?
I focus MY environmental energies on winnable contests, like defeating PUDs, SR 313 and enacting a St. Augustine National Historical Park Study Act.
Developers would like nothing more than to divert our attentions from what really matters.
Removing trash cans from beaches, really?
Making environmentalists unpopular?
Focusing on trivial pursuits while failing to work for our future?
Taking trash cans off the beach and sending people home in their cars to Palatka with their smelly diapers, uneaten fries and empty soda bottles?
Is that the highest and best use of environmentalists time?
What meaningless activity.
Making people take their trash home, instead of collecting it in situ.
How trite.
This is truly Amateur Hour for Activists.
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From Treasure Coast Palm:
Gil Smart: Martin County’s ‘trash free’ policy tossed in the garbage, sort of
Michael and Claudette Young (from left), of Stuart, view the new Bigbelly solar powered trash and recycling compactors, along with Nancy Van Riper, of Stuart, at the Bathtub Reef Beach pavilion on MacArthur Boulevard on Tuesday in Stuart. Martin County's "trash free parks" program removed trash cans from the park, replacing them with the one solar powered unit. "I think we need more, not less," Claudette Young said about removing trash cans. "Maybe people would use them if they were there, but not seeing them, they're not going to take it (trash) home with them, they are going to leave it." (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)
Michael and Claudette Young (from left), of Stuart, view the new Bigbelly solar powered trash and recycling compactors, along with Nancy Van Riper, of Stuart, at the Bathtub Reef Beach pavilion on MacArthur Boulevard on Tuesday in Stuart. Martin County's "trash free parks" program removed trash cans from the park, replacing them with the one solar powered unit. "I think we need more, not less," Claudette Young said about removing trash cans. "Maybe people would use them if they were there, but not seeing them, they're not going to take it (trash) home with them, they are going to leave it." (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)
Gil Smart
Columnist
Posted: June 28, 2016
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Beer bottles rest in the sand Tuesday at a beach access path where, according to lifeguards, a trash can once stood along the dune at Bathtub Reef Beach on MacArthur Boulevard in Stuart. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)
Beer bottles rest in the sand Tuesday at a beach access path where, according to lifeguards, a trash can once stood along the dune at Bathtub Reef Beach on MacArthur Boulevard in Stuart. (ERIC HASERT/TREASURE COAST NEWSPAPERS)
Over the past week, Martin County residents have been losing their collective grip — and the algae was only one reason.
Another reason was garbage.
On June 24, the Martin County Parks and Recreation Department announced plans for a "trash-free parks" program aimed at reducing waste, educating the public and saving taxpayer dollars in the process.
All good.
But to achieve these goals, the parks department announced it would remove trash cans from beaches and other public spaces and instead would count on people to adopt a "carry in, carry out" mentality.
In other words, those wrappers, used diapers and uneaten fries? Take 'em with you.
That led to what Parks Director Kevin Abbate called a "mini explosion," particularly online, where local residents deemed the proposal the stupidest thing ever.
From Facebook: "People are not going to take it with them, they will leave it on our beaches," Jackie Plemons said.
Added Christine Burr: "People already leave litter even with trash cans. Dumb idea."
Or my favorite, from Nick Peragine: "Wow. And we are betting on the human condition ... why?"
And that's the thing: The trash-free parks program works on the assumption that people will be responsible citizens.
I'm 48 years on this planet and long ago came to the conclusion that it's usually best to assume the exact opposite.
So people flipped, and Martin County officials shifted into reverse. Late Monday, commissioners Doug Smith and John Haddox announced on Facebook that "Trashgate" was over. The trash can policy was being rescinded and the receptacles would be put back on the beaches "where they belong," as Haddox's re-election page put it.
And that's that. Except it isn't.
What's actually happening, according to a news release issued Monday night by the parks department, is that Bathtub Reef Beach, Stuart Beach and Jensen Beach are getting new, high-tech trash cans — "Bigbelly" solar-powered trash and recycling compactors — that can hold up to five times as much trash as a typical can.
Meanwhile, the parks department will continue to test its trash-free program at other, "passive" park locations by removing some or all of the trash receptacles.
Call it a partial retreat. But Abbate remains a believer in the "trash free" approach, counterintuitive as it seems.
"We did this as an experiment when I worked in Broward County," Abbate said.
Amid budget cuts, staff pulled trash cans from Butterfly World, which leases space at Tradewinds Park & Stables.
"Previously, we had nine cans that overflowed every day," he said. "We pulled them out — and we found everybody who left Butterfly World took their trash home with them in their car."
The National Park Service launched a similar pilot program in 2013, removing trash cans from the George Washington Parkway, a 32-mile national park/commuter route dotted with historic sites, memorials, picnic groves and wildlife refuges. Results have been mixed — the NPS says there's no indication parks are trashier than they were before, while critics disagree and point out that park-goers tend to dump refuse in porta-potties.
And in New York City, the Metropolitan Transit Authority actually removed trash cans from subway platforms and now claims subway stations are cleaner than ever before — a claim refuted by the New York State Comptroller.
In many cases, these policies are driven, at least in part, by a desire to save money: fewer bins to empty means less manpower is needed.
Abbate, however, framed it in terms of efficiency.
"If we're spending 80 percent of our time doing trash, and can cut it to 40 percent, that's more time we can spend power washing and doing other things," he said.
And that's a pretty laudable goal, though whether it can be realized now in the wake of the partial scuttling of the program, I don't know.
In one respect, it's kind of unfair that the parks department got beaten up to the extent it did on this issue, because as noted — it's not like they dreamed this up. And if it could work, it could do a lot of good.
But that's a pretty big "if," and it's clear from the response both online and off that the public doesn't trust the public to act responsibly.
And that alone is a good reason to recalibrate the program.
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About Gil Smart
Gil Smart is a columnist for Treasure Coast Newspapers and a member of the Editorial Board. His columns reflect his opinion. Readers may reach him at gil.smart@tcpalm.com, by phone at 772-223-4741 or via Twitter at @TCPalmGilSmart.
On the shore of Ocean Beach, in San Francisco, you’re likely to see sand dollars, swarms of squishy purple Velella velella, and surfers rising and falling on the Pacific Ocean waves. What you won’t see is a trash can.
Earlier this month, the National Park Service plucked most of the garbage receptacles from the beach as part of an experiment to see whether the lack of trash cans would inspire guests to take their cast-offs with them, SF Gatereported.
Some beachgoers complained that they didn’t want to haul soggy napkins or crumpled soda cans home with them. The lack of waste containers also presents some, er, sticky logistical challenges for guests who may have to ferry around a baggie of dog poop or a soiled diaper. SF Weekly didn’t mince words on Twitter:
A few outlets, among them SFist, reported that with the cans gone, visitors just made little towers of trash in their stead.
But the Richmond District Blog posted a defense of the project from an NPS representative, who wrote in an email:
“We are hoping to save staff time and allow them to focus on other high impact areas … Not to mention how nice the historic sea wall looks without trash cans.”
And Adrienne Freeman, a public affairs representative for the Golden Gate National Recreation area, assured the San Francisco Chronicle that, “If trash really starts to accumulate, we are going to put the trash cans back.” Freeman noted that people were starting to take more “personal responsibility,” adding, “We are seeing a cleaner beach.”
Campaigns for cleaner parks
Though it’s tempting to think of parks as purely sweeping, granite vistas and churning waterfalls, the staffers have to deal with the very tangible—and sometimes, gross and smelly—consequences of heavy usage.
Waste management has long presented a problem for national parks. The Green Parks Plan, issued in 2012, mandated that parks explore ways to promote stewardship, capitalize on renewable energy, decrease emissions, and divert garbage. As CityLab reported over the summer, some parks have phased out plastic water bottles as a way to keep thousands of pounds of garbage out of the waste stream.
The George Washington Memorial Parkway—a road linking historic sites throughout Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.—launched an ambitious trash-free program in April 2013 to reduce the 380 tons of solid waste that visitors generated each year. The trash-free program is based on the “carry in, carry out” motto, meaning that anything visitors bring in to the park has to leave with them. Their goal was to cut the amount by 90 percent by the end of 2015.
The initiative has been successful, says Aaron LaRocca, chief of staff for the George Washington Memorial Parkway. He notes particular success in Great Falls Park, which attracts about 700,000 visitors a year. “They’re there primarily to recreate,” says LaRocca. “They bring picnic equipment, recreation equipment, they kind of just hang out there all day.” That offers a lot of opportunities to generate waste.
The key, he thinks, was a robust outreach and education program, which involved posting placards all over the park and supplying small, one-time use bags for personal litter collection. “Of course, there was a learning curve,” says LaRocca. “But it was all about telling the public why we have the trash-free initiative—not just removing the trash cans and expecting everyone to understand.”
Litter-free subways
New York City has a similar initiative, but in a very different context. Since 2011, the MTA has removed trash cans from 39 station platforms with the aim of decreasing festering garbage and stymying the rats that flock to it. But does it work?
In 2012, the MTA reported a 50- to 67-percent decrease in the amount of trash removed from the stations that were part of the pilot program. This September, though, the office of New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli released an audit contradicting those findings. In a statement, DiNapoli slung some zingers:
"It's not clear that it met MTA's goals of improving straphangers' experience and making stations cleaner and there's no evidence it reduced the number of rats in subway stations. After four years the best one can say about this experiment is that it's inconclusive, except for the fact that riders have a harder time finding a trash can."
The MTA issued a statement refuting those claims and voicing its intention to continue the program.
The NPS argues that trash-free parks often lead to better visitor experiences, slashing the pest population, eliminating offensive odors, and freeing up staff to devote more time and resources to different projects. NPS estimates that between 80 and 95 percent of people who visit trash-free parks do dispose of their refuse elsewhere—though they may grumble about it.
Jessica Leigh Hester is a senior associate editor at CityLab, covering culture, hyperlocal history, and sustainability. Previously, she was a contributing editor at Modern Farmer. Her work also appears in The Atlantic,New York Times, Village Voice, Slate, BBC, NPR, and other outlets.
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