Trash coming from a small 10 square foot section in the woods behind apartments and next to a fraternity house.
Joshua Baker and I volunteered at the Carriage Lane site for the Rivers Alive Outreach. We took part in a trash clean-up. Carriage Lane is between the Clarke Garden apartments and the Woodlands of Athens. It is also next to the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house. Consequently, Joshua and I discovered plenty of litter ranging from empty bags of Doritos to the more prevalent beer bottle and beer can. The Carriage Lane section that I was apart of was further broken up into several teams. We were originally going to be assigned a specific part of the road by the discretion of the leaders, but Joshua and I asked if we could clean up a specific spot. It was in the trees next to the garbage containers and the closest spot to the fraternity house. As a result, there was a lot of trash to clean up.
The location we cleaned up was right next to the garbage container, so I assumed that people would just walk a few feet to that box to discard their waste. However, I was surprised to find out that this area had the most litter not only in its immediate vicinity but also 10-20 feet away. This revelation made me question the social implications of the people living in this area. It led to outward pity and sadness. Furthermore, I am increasingly concerned about the laziness of people and our community as a whole. Athens is public and all of ours to enjoy. Given this, why hadn’t this been cleaned prior to our project? In a larger sense, I am concerned about how numerous this type of negative activity is for America as a whole.
I wish I could say I have hope for the immediate future. Given that Athens is blessed with the environmentally conscious University of Georgia, it can be assumed that the most effort possible is being brought forward to decrease environmental degradation. Litter requires the most menial action to clean up. All you need is gloves, a grabber, and a trash bag. It doesn’t require extensive research or any advanced machinery. If Athens has large amounts of litter even with an active eco-conscious community and programs such as Rivers Alive, then any city could be extensively littered. But that situation is actually not the case and this is where my hope arises: city-planning. With increasing mapping technology, city planners can absorb and note information about where trash piles up. It turns out that litter is dismissed as being solvable by menial action. However, litter clean-ups could be improved from more advanced information. Technology can be used to decrease our environmental pollution and I have long-term hope for those changes.
I enjoyed my time with Josh and my time helping the environment. It felt great to contribute. I was impressed by Rivers Alive as a whole and their ability to locate sites that are in need of cleaning up. However, I am saddened that the litter exists in the first place. This experience also reminds me of the great demand Athens and other communities have for volunteer work, so I will be doing more clean-ups in the future. I will also communicate my concern to people I know so that the word goes around. I hope that Athens and other communities can solve their litter problems and promote a greater eco-consciousness for the world.
