The old man slowly made his way through the grass heading for the trail down into the creek. He had been here before but felt like his luck would change that day.
His tools, a trash bag and grabber, were in his hands as he walked onto the bank of the creek and looked down. Litter from the rains a few days before filled his sight. He knew his black plastic bag would be full in no time at all.
Sounds like fiction but it occurs every time volunteers go into a creek to clean up litter.
Charles Blank, River Aid San Antonio Executive Director said, “Careful planning, effective procedures, and very determined volunteers at every event mean that each RASA cleanup averages 3,485 pounds of litter and debris recovered from our waterways.”
The old man walked down into the creek bed. Extending his grabber, he picked up an empty water bottle and put it into the black bag in his left hand.
The Texas Department of Transportation 2023 Texas Litter Survey found that nearly 30% of large litter was beverage containers. The survey also found that the most littered beverage container was plastic water bottles.
As he waded into the piles of foam packing materials the old man’s thoughts drifted back to his childhood. He wondered what the native American from “Keep America Beautiful: The Crying Indian” commercial would think about our current litter problem. Would a tear roll down his face again?
The commercial’s narrator, William Conrad, says: "People start pollution; people can stop it."
More than 50 years later this statement still rings true. We’re still trying to stop litter and we’re working hard to lessen its impact on our environment.
We’re more informed about the global impacts of local pollution. We all know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean that’s twice the size of Texas. It’s not the only garbage patch impacting our marine ecosystems. There are five total in the world oceans. Two in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic, and one in the Indian Ocean.
We may not have a Texas size garbage patch in the Gulf of Mexico but the litter from San Antonio makes it into the Gulf. Every piece of litter we stop here is another piece of litter that doesn’t have to be cleaned up further down the chain.
The old man looked down the creek and watched the other volunteers putting the last of the days litter in their bags. It had been a good day. The litter pile was high and the creek bed clean for now. The old man sighed, walked up the creek bank, and headed home to get ready for another day of tacking San Antonio’s litter problem.
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