Earlier this week I noticed some aluminum cans along the road next to the Kennett Square Meadow. Thinking that picking up roadside waste is a great way to get in my steps I grabbed a trash bag and started on a walk along the quiet country road. After about 20 
minutes my bag started to get full. What at first looked to be only cans turned out to be a surprising mix of waste items.
I thought about tying up the bag and tossing it in a trash can but then thought, what a great opportunity for a waste audit! So, home it came to be sorted and weighed with our handy dandy kitchen scale. In all, the bag contained 5 pounds, 10 ounces of mixed waste!
So what was in that 5 pds, 10 oz? About 3 pds, 8 oz was recyclable in the single stream system, 5 oz could be recycled but it would take some work, 13.5 oz might be recyclable, and there was 15.4 oz of material that could only be designated landfill bound waste.On the way back to the meadow I glimpsed a little bit of green in the stream that cuts through the property.
8.0 oz Recyclable Aluminum Cans, 1.9 oz Non-recyclable Coffee Cups, 2 pds, 5.7 oz Recyclable Glass, 4.0 oz Recyclable With Difficulty Miscellaneous Plastic, 7.9 oz Recyclable Paper, 2.0 oz Recyclable Plastic, 13.5 oz Maybe Recyclable Rubber, 0.2 oz Recyclable With Difficulty Styrofoam, 0.8 oz Recyclable With Difficulty Snack Packaging, 0.5 oz Recyclable Thin Film Plastic, 13.5 oz Non-recyclable Miscellaneous Trash.
This particular mile long stretch of road has six houses dotted along it which means the trash along the road probably came from driver’s throwing their trash out the windows of their cars and pick-up trucks.
On the way back to the meadow, I glimpsed a little bit of green in the stream that cuts through the property. Closer inspection revealed that the green was an empty, recyclable, fertilizer bag that had become entangled in and frozen onto an underwater 
branch. It was probably blown there from the road by the wind. I 
tried pulling and digging and poking it loose to no avail. The beautiful pristine stream is now showing a flag of litter until a thaw comes or until I don some waders and brave the icy depths to chop it out.
The Zero Waste movement has caught hold across the US with cities, including NY and Philadelphia, pledging to meet zero-waste and litter goals by educating citizens to reduce consumption, buy smarter, recycle right, and upcycle, and by incentivizing stores, manufacturers and delivery companies to use smarter packaging and start take-back programs. Cities are also educating citizens to take responsibility for their own trash by disposing of it properly.
I can almost understand litter in a city where there are so many people and so much activity but out by the meadow I cannot understand anyone’s blatant disregard for other people, for nature, and for the health of the environment – that is what litter is all about – a selfish disregard for the rest of us. This 5 pds, 10 oz represents one, 20-minute walk, on one mile, of one back road. There are about 4.12 million miles of road in the US. If all of them were treated with equal disregard that could translate into a lot of litter. Instead, let’s all of us commit to a zero-waste lifestyle and enjoy an un-littered world. In the meantime I have put the aluminum, glass, and paper in the recycling bin; taken the thin film plastic to the grocery store for recycling; have disposed of the landfill bound waste and am looking for a place to take the rubber pieces.
