By now you’ve seen the pictures or the video clips of a trash-clogged McKellar Lake. Your reactions probably included amazed disgust. Unfortunately, people like us, who engage in cleanup activities, are not at all surprised. Clean Memphis, Memphis City Beautiful, the Sierra Club and many other groups have performed numerous cleanup projects over the years with little sustainable difference.
Why? Could it be a lack of education or awareness? Apathy? Or as editor Chris Peck suggested in a recent column in The Commercial Appeal, are we all wrapped up in our own little worlds and as long as “my street” is clean, “my school” is good — everything is fine? We believe the answer is all of the above.
The real question: How do we change? How do we get our citizens to realize that litter affects us all and that a clean environment is good for everyone?
Our answer: We need an intervention!
We need to use the tragedy and embarrassment of McKellar Lake as a catalyst for a campaign for cleanup and attitude change the likes of which Memphis has never seen. We need to engage every individual, neighborhood group, business, church, school and civic group in community cleanup and educational outreach. Everyone should be involved.
Clean Memphis has divided the city into 31 zones that provide an ideal framework for collaboration within geographic boundaries. Zone leaders could coordinate strategic cleanup and educational activities within their zone. With the help of other zone partners they could identify areas that are most problematic and work to engage everyone within the zone to participate. There is no better way to raise awareness, cultivate environmental stewardship and foster civic responsibility than to engage people in the cleanup process.
Let me be clear. There is an enormous amount of cleanup activity already going on in and around Memphis. Memphis City Beautiful loans out tools and other supplies weekly to neighborhood groups and other agencies like ours to support cleanup activities. They also provide anti-litter education for schools. The Memphis and Shelby County mayors and their staffs are highly focused on addressing litter and blight in Memphis. There are eight Police-Joint Agency Partnerships that organize cleanups, identify code issues and report on crime trends. Clean Memphis organizes cleanups almost every weekend in addition to monthly sweeps of high-profile areas around Graceland, the National Civil Rights Museum, Stax and Sun Studios. These activities are important and must continue; however, we must expand the reach of our collective efforts to include the participation of everyone in the city — not just in cleanup but in the cultivation of civic responsibility. A new idea coming from Canada involves fostering environmental responsibility from employees in the commercial sector, Mississauga commercial cleaning services hold regular information seminars for their employees as well as providing free access to recycling services for employees to make it easy to stay green at home.
In 2009 Keep America Beautiful commissioned a Litter in America study from California State University. The key findings of this study are revealing:
1) People matter. Most littering observed in the study — 81 percent — was committed “with intent” by the individual, and was mainly attributable to lack of individual awareness or sense of obligation.
2) Context matters. Fifteen percent of all littering can be attributed to context. The strongest contextual contributor to littering is the prevalence of existing litter. In other words, litter begets litter.
3) Age matters. Older individuals (30 years and over) littered less than younger individuals. But gender, surprisingly, was not related to litter rates.
On May 7 Clean Memphis will coordinate a citywide cleanup. Two locations in each of the 31 zones will be designated for organized cleanups. Numerous businesses, community groups and government agencies have already committed their support. Individuals will be able to register for a cleanup site of his or her choice through our website, cleanmemphis.org, in early April. Our goal is not a “one-shot” cleanup, but rather the engagement of as many people as possible in the “mission” of cleaning up the city.
The May 7 cleanup is the kick-off for our campaign to make Memphis a cleaner city. When Living Lands & Waters, the group that has been conducting the massive cleanup of McKellar Lake, returns this time next year to continue their efforts, wouldn’t it be great if we could just take them out for ribs and some brews because their work here was already done?
Janet Boscarino is executive director of Clean Memphis. Contact her at 488-6786 or janet@cleanmemphis.org.
When I was growing up in Memphis, anti-littering laws were enforced,and littering carried a stiff fine. I think it was $50 in the 1950’s – a lot of money. It was easier then because there were no fast food restaurants to contribute their litter to so many meals-on-the-go.
But City Beautiful was a priority with the city government and therefore with the citizens. Poverty is always a factor in littering – every poor country we visit, we see a littered landscape. As Memphis poverty continues and grows, so does litter.
Clean Memphis is an important concept and if we can achieve that, it will improve all of our lives.
Thank you, Janet Zimmerman
Please support the ” bottle bill”- it will impose a 5 cent deposit on containers . That way the littler becomes valuable! We need Bill Norris to support it .
Also the city was supposed to put a filtering system on the streams and gayoso bayou outlets where the storm drains allow the litter from all over our city pour into the harbor and river. They were supposed to do it 14 tears ago . They have the money . It’s time to make sure it gets done .
Thanks very much,
Karen Soro
Jesus that is disgusting. I have lived in metro areas much larger than Memphis that would never have anything that disgusting. How can Memphis attract money, people, tourism, business – when you guys can’t even keep trash out of your water?
And TN doesn’t have bottle/can refunds? Is TN living in the dark ages? Does TN state government have an environment or ecology department? Where are they with this – as that water can’t be healthy for plants or wildlife…
Portland gets fined millions by the EPA when we have a once or twice a year sewer overflow – how come Memphis gets to spew trash into the water?
Disgusting. Memphis will never be attractive to anyone if all you have to offer is garbage and crime. Instead of organizing volunteer cleanups you should be organizing a citizen revolt against a completely ineffective government.
You should be taxing every single business that sells disposable products. You should be providing free and easy recycling services for residents. You should be enforcing litter laws. You should have an ecology department that has teeth. You should tax companies to share the cleanup burden of the properties they inhabit. Tax the population and make a MASSIVE public information campaign about how litter is directly costing them x% in taxes – and if they want to save money stop littering. Have a bottle bill – in Oregon for example homeless people collect every glass and plastic bottle and can. People actually love off recycling…
And maybe there SHOULD be trails and paths and things that go by those areas so that people DO see what is disgusting and they DO get sick to their stomachs themselves and start to make change. Make it NOT “out of sight out of mind”.
There are so many ways.
Memphis loves to give tax breaks to lure companies. But you know what companies want? Companies want nice places for their executives to live. Nice clean safe places. Tax breaks might lure a company to put a facility there – but if you want actual businesses to actually BE there you need clean places. You need good schools. You need safe streets. You need Memphis to not suck so that executives will actually want to be there… If I was looking to locate a successful multi-million dollar business I would not even consider Memphis just based on this alone. I would want my family and my employees families to have nice clean places to go see nature and wildlife – not cesspools of garbage.
How on earth that much trash ends up in the ecosystem in the United States of America in 2011 is beyond me. That clearly violates federal water quality standards, and the Clean Water Act.
Come on Memphis – clean up your act!
I would expect someone from Portland to be enlightened enough to not resort to generalizations based on a blog. Believe it or not, we do have a recycling program and every Thursday morning there are residents who stop buy and collect my aluminum cans before they are picked up for recycling. More power to them.
Regardless, the trash screens at the Nonconnah and its tributaries would go far in reducing this pollution. Please provide more notice for the next clean-up, I know plenty who would gladly participate. The bottle deposit has real opportunity as well considering the success seen in the tire collection program.
What’s his/her being from Portland have anything to do with his/her stating an opinion ? Fairly said in my own opinion
Memphis a little defensive when confronted with disdain ?
Looks like you are the one generalizing about what your own narrow expectations about his being ‘enlightened’. what does he care about your ‘expectations’ anyway ?
Amazing reaction to a fair opinion and criticism. It’s true in that what executive would actually press to choose Memphis if those variables are important to him, his employess or his company. He would be a fool, when there are other location options.
Yes, it does seem that Memphis is behind the curve on this issue as well. Making excuses or endorsing half-hearted solutions is weird.
Translation- Another post by the same author. Still can’t stand to have your own posts and opinions questioned I see. I also see you failed- once again- to respond (or understand) the primary response to the original. Making generalizations based on a single article is shallow and quite un-enlightened. Posting under a different author’s name to make it appear there is some support for your notions is weird.
Carolinian was not me. Sorry that you seem to think that being disgusted with a trash filled lake is something only one person would share.
In reality – the only reason there are not more comments here about how disgusting that trash really is – is simply because Smart City Memphis probably doesn’t have a whole lot of readership from outside of the Memphis area.
But for those of us who have a vested interest in Memphis – and therefore are keeping up with Memphis happenings, we see this as something that has not happened in most major cities since the 1970s and 1980s.
Portland MSA has 1 million more people than Memphis MSA. We have much more water here. Yet I have not seen even 1/100th that much trash anywhere – and I spend a lot of time exploring wetlands, streams, rivers, and lakes. Not even in our massively polluted Columbia Slough which runs through industrial areas has trash heaps like that.
Is Portland perfect? Of course not. We have all kinds of pollution. We have crime and grime too. Just no where near the scale that you apparently have there.
I spend time in Atlanta, Seattle, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Chicago, and other places – and have never seen as much trash outside a landfill as that video showed right there in Memphis.
Sure the gate thingies would help keep the trash out of the lake, but what do you do with all the trash in the creek, and how do you pick that up? You need to stop the problem at the source.
Don’t tell me Memphis has good recycling. Every visit there I can’t find a recycling bin to save my life. And with no bottle bill, there is no incentive for people to collect bottles or cans.
I don’t claim to know what the solution for Memphis is because I don’t know how you motivate Memphians. But I guarantee that things like this only reinforce the stereotype that Memphis is a rathole.
Any person who watches that video would be disgusted – just that very few people outside of Memphis care – until a company starts looking for places to relocate and Google searches bring them here…
However, I do feel that the beginning of the solution IS to run the green line trail right through there. Get those Germantown and Collierville residents back to that lake (the folks who used to recreate there in the 1950s) and let them see how it is being destroyed. When the rich folk start wanting to have nice areas around to bike to on a sunny Saturday, they will start pushing politicians to clean the place up. Activists like us mount to a hill of beans compared to a few rich folk complaining to elected leaders. So I say put that trail in, and let the people see the trash first hand.
That actually helped us here in Portland protect a wetland that had been battered pretty badly – we put a trail through Oaks Bottom and as soon as people started seeing the wetland they started caring about it, and low and behold the place cleaned up and people started wanting the government to protect it.
It looks like your lake there has been “out of sight out of mind” for too long.
Sorry to hurt your feelings by being overly critical of a disgusting pile of trash!
P.S. My comments were harsh – but my goal should is the same as yours. Clean water. I just don’t get how you let it go *that far*.
There is a physical reason trash collects in that area of McKellar; that it is a slack, backwater area that fluctuates hugely in water level. I first saw that trash problem about 15 years ago when I used to go birding in Ensley Bottoms. It is stupefyingly bad, but exists b/c people litter (and businesses don’t clean up their lots or cover their truck loads-if all businesses would police the litter on their properties, this could help greatly), the litter gets washed down Nonconnah Creek, and the Mississippi River rising levels push the trash back into the slack area upstream from the Nonconnah mouth, where it stays. Since the filling in of the President’s Island causeway many years ago, there is no active downstream river flow from the main channel to wash it down river, and ultimately into the Gulf.
The ultimate solution is for Memphis to cut the littering way down, but that area of McKellar is always going to have a problem with litter accumulating in that spot.
Portland- I apologize for confusing your posts with another author with an affinity for making broad generalizations about entire communities based on one example or issue. However, I was unaware of the issue until fairly recently and I would imagine many others share this ignorance. I will ask you this, when other cities have faced massive pollution issues in the past, have they tackled the problem before or after the public was made widely aware of the issue? No corporate giant is skipping Memphis because a backwater industrial harbor with low public visibility is polluted. As packrat stated, reopen the causeway between the city and McKellar Lake and your basis for criticizing the entire community and its citizenry would literally be washed away. Apparently you have this area confused with a highly visible and heavily used recreational lake. That is not the case, so a few questions and a little research might have been in order.
Trust me, my “feelings” were in no way injured by the comments. It is what it is. However, I do take issue when individuals pass judgment on an entire community and its citizens based on a blog post or a single example. Perhaps you should become more informed on the local community and the different organizations efforts here concerning both public education and the clean-up efforts that have been executed and continue on various other waterways across the city.
I also suggest you take the same critical and highly focused search on some of those other cities you listed if you believe Memphis is the only city with serious water pollution and runoff issues. “According to Jay Manning, Director, Wash. Dept. of Ecology, runoff from the streets of Seattle dump the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill into Puget Sound every two years. (5.4 million gallons per year)”. At the onset of each rainstorm, the Los Angeles River is transformed into a floating mat of plastic and debris despite trash retention efforts. As a friend in Atlanta reminded me per this conversation, the trash in Peachtree Creek and Big Creek in Atlanta is overwhelming and creates recurring flashflood issues at the onset of each heavy downpour there- especially after extended dry spells. Ignorance of local realities does not mean that this problem does not exist across the nation. Once again, referencing the actual drainage and currents in the area and you will find that while many of these other locations literally see the problem washed downriver, McKellar Lake is unique in that it actually retains the vast majority of the trash and waste that enters this body of water. Does this excuse the problem? Certainly not and as you can see, there are those that are beginning to make the lake’s cleanup an active priority. There actually is a unique possibility here in that McKellar Lake can help to capture most of the city’s runoff waste before it is allowed to enter the main channel of the Mississippi River unlike other major cities that can conveniently turn a blind eye to the problem.
Hey, I said Portland has lots of problems – as does every city. Portland had the Willamette river classified as one of America’s most polluted waterways.
But your “solutions” you mentioned are almost exactly what I said – just reworded. Business needs to take an active part – clean up their own lots, stop their own littering etc..
And Yes, those other cities have big problems too – just that they are many times the size of Memphis and have much less problem per capita. Also, you posted about polluted run-off in the Puget Sound area – which is not what we are discussing here – Memphis probably has plenty of polluted run-off too. We are talking about trash – which you correctly cited from LA and Atlanta. I have personally seen the one in LA and it is not all that extreme (still gross and crappy though). However the regulations and policies in California are MUCH more strict than Memphis and TN. Per capita the mega cities in California have a much smaller problem than Memphis.
And you don’t need to worry about me passing judgement. What you need to worry about is people with money and power seeing this. Sure it might be hidden to one small spot where the trash gathers due to geographical anomalies – but the pictures and video are still out there. When the stories talk about this being in Memphis – they don’t clarify that it is one small place where the current slacks so trash gathers. They just show Memphis with piles of trash. And when I go to Google Maps and look where it is? Smack dab in the middle of Memphis. (Well, admittedly a little south – but you know what I mean).
It’s like press that paints Portland as a dreary rainy miserable place. Sure that may not be the actual case, but it’s what people think because of a couple small jokes here and there. Memphis is rapidly becoming known for trash and crime instead of blues and barbecue.
I just don’t get how you can defend a massive pile of trash. Your responses should be “Yeah, it is f-ing disgusting – we should take every measure possible to clean that s**t up!” (which is what the original article was talking about in the first place – I merely commented that volunteer cleanup efforts are a short term fix as the trash will come back unless you make changes top-down).
And as for Oregon – nowhere is perfect. Check out this post:
http://incursio.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-shooting-should-be-banned-in.html
I understand your point and I will readily agree with “yeah, it is f-ing disgusting – we should take every measure possible to clean that s**t up!” and I mean that! We “should” have tighter regulations and both the local business community and citizenry “should” be doing more. However, much as we see in Texas and Georgia, the actual feet on the ground clean-up efforts are limited to volunteer organizations. This is a relatively unknown problem locally even though many will readily admit we do seem to have an inordinate amount of trash in our public places. Volunteer efforts can become long term resources to address such problems, after all Tennessee is the “Volunteer State”. Volunteers drive Shelby Farms, meet to try and rid Shelby Forrest of invasive privet, have been cleaning and improving Lick Creek and underscore most of the Wolf River Conservancy efforts. I have no doubt that the video and recent volunteer efforts will raise awareness of the problem and will lead to further action. Of course to what means and ends remains unknown. The true litmus test will be this time next year.
At some point we will need to spend public money on the issue, but in an world where Memphis already has some of the highest local taxes in the region (although low compared to national averages) we are faced with decisions of where to cut in order to fund such efforts. It is a difficult and very contentious public issue.
To your point concerning those with money and power, I can only hope that those who so readily focus on a negative local issue such as this will bother to read and discover efforts to address the problem and examples of success found in the same community. Unfortunately, bad news sells more readily than good news.