This past weekend I attended a trash cleanup through the Outdoors Club. This event was one of the last events that the Outdoors club put together to hopefully encourage people to get outside during the last, stressful week of classes and to benefit our environment and clean up the city we all love and live in. There were about 20 people there and we all split up and covered different ground. We began the cleanup by moving through campus and cleaning up around the cistern and through cougar mall. My group then walked along King Street and made it all the way to the Open Air Market. We figured this would be a good route to take because this is a tourist heavy area and an area that a lot of cars move through. We found a lot of small debris that were hard to pick up, mostly like cigarette butts and paper and plastic that had been broken down. While on the trash clean up I began to think about the sources of the pollution which in this case was obviously the trash. A main source of this trash would be the humans that disregard the environment and litter their trash. Another one would be the trash cans that are throughout campus and the city. The majority of the ones usually do not have tops, they are open bins which allows trash to be picked up from the wind and dispersed elsewhere. There also is not a lot of recycling bins around the city. Comparing Charleston to a big city like Chicago, the majority of their trash cans have a pull door on the front ensuring that any trash that goes in stays in. Chicago also has recycling bins separating paper, plastic and aluminum. This is a very simple initiative that could be carried through in Charleston to allow people to have a place to throw away any litter, and ensure that it gets disposed of elsewhere, and hopefully recycled.

It was very disheartening to see all of this trash in our city. My take away from the event was that many people have a complete disregard for their environment and community. But also, that our city doesn’t allow for people to have the option to recycle their recyclables. This also made me think of communities that participate in bottle returns. For example in Michigan, any sort of plastic, aluminum or glass bottle (usually drinking bottles) has an extra tax on them. This tax forces people to return their bottles to a recycling center to get their money back. Each bottle can be up to 5-20 cents, which can quickly add up. This simple system allows people to be rewarded for recycling which I am sure also encourages people to begin recycling other things and or finding other alternative ways to decrease their amount of waste.

Overall this event was a good way to bring people together and get people outside by benefiting the environment. After the clean up, we all felt as if this needed to be done multiple times, so I hope that we can organize these clean ups more often.