Netscape: An urban trash collage speaks volumes
By: Tom Waldron

Baltimore, it seems, is filled with litterbugs. Nowhere is this more evident than in the water alongside Boston Street.

There, in the heart of rehabbed Canton, an underground drainage stream called Harris Creek empties into the Harbor, enormous pipes spewing out water collected over 1,200 acres on the city’s east side.

After every rain, the small basin fills up with an impressive, multi-colored array of trash—thousands of empty bottles, cans, Styrofoam cups, chip bags, candy wrappers, and old diapers. Dig deeper and you’ll find countless cigarette butts, hypodermic
needles, clothes, condoms, and, heartbreakingly, more than a few rubber balls that bounced down Ellwood Avenue or Oliver Street, before dropping into a sewer. Aside from the smell, it is a beautiful urban collage.

Not long ago, such trash littering the streets of Baltimore would have washed into the storm drains with every rain shower, flowed into the city’s creeks and streams and then poured into the Harbor. Now it collects alongside Boston Street because of a new trash-collection system installed in the spring of 2006. Four twelve-foot-long trash nets are suspended in the water under a floating collection platform.

An arcing plastic boom is designed to catch the trash and funnel it into the collection nets. But due to its design limitations—and the sheer volume of trash that flows out of the storm sewers—trash routinely overflows the boom and fills the holding area inside a second, outer boom.

After major rainstorms, a crew of Baltimore Public Works employees must row through the mess and use big nets to scoop up the trash—a chore that can take days for a crew of three or more. While imperfect, the trash collection system is helping keep the Harbor a bit cleaner.

Over a five-month period in 2006 and early 2007, crews removed more than sixteen tons of debris—more than two hundred pounds of waste a day. While that seems like a lot, it accounts for only a small fraction of the trash flowing into the Harbor.

“We’re a bunch of pigs,” Phillip Lee says. And he should know. Nobody has paid more attention to the project than Lee, a professional civil engineer in Canton and a board member of the Baltimore Harbor Watershed Association.

Three similar trash-net collection systems are now in place around the city—Harris Creek, on Gwynns Falls in Carroll Park, and near Alluvion Street just south of M&T Bank Stadium. A more prominent one is planned for the middle of the Jones Falls later this year, giving tourists and locals an up-close view of the trash-collection effort.

And visibility of the trash nets is key. After all, Lee is the first to acknowledge that the trash nets do not solve the littering problem. They do, however, provide a stark demonstration of the extent of the problem. “You bring people to the trash collector and they see all this debris and they’re shocked,” he says.

The nets work at one end of the trash-disposal system. Reducing litter will require other steps. One of the most promising would be a bottle and can deposit law for Maryland. Now in place in eleven states, such laws require consumers to pay an extra deposit (typically between five and fifteen cents) on each container they purchase. When they return the containers (typically at a grocery store, liquor outlet or redemption center), they get their deposit back.

The Baltimore Harbor Watershed Association pushed for a deposit law in Annapolis this year—the first time the idea has been considered in fifteen years. Del. Peter A. Hammen, whose district includes Canton (and the Harris Creek trash collector), sponsored the legislation. But the bill ran into strong opposition from the bottling industry and beverage companies and died in a House committee.

Evidence strongly suggests that a bottle-deposit law would lead to a cleaner Baltimore. On average, states with such laws have seen their bottle litter reduced by at least seventy percent, according to a variety of studies. 

Lee will keep working for the bill’s passage, but he would like to see a long-term educational initiative to teach young people about trash.

“You really have to change the culture for kids in grades K through 12,” Lee says. “Maybe in ten years we can reduce that sixteen tons of trash to ten tons. But that doesn’t solve the problem. All we’re doing is picking up after people.”

—Tom Waldron is a freelance writer and the author of Pride of the Sea.