Keeping litter at bay

City budgets are taking a hit. In North America, New York is projecting a shortfall of $8.3 billion, Los Angeles $200-400 million (which seems oddly optimistic), and Toronto $1.3 billion.

As a result of budget shortfalls, some cities plan to cut municipal services like street sweeping, trash collection, and cleaning. New York’s already gotten started.

This has happened before. During the last recession, budget cuts, in combination with residents’ unwillingness to move their cars for sweepers, ended Philadelphia’s street sweeping program in 2009. 

I think you’ll believe what happened next. Still, studying Philly’s recent filth can offer a preview of what awaits the rest of us, and how we can do better. 

It wasn’t always this way.

Frankie cleans up the streets

Back in the middle 1700s, Benjamin Franklin lamented the filth of Philadelphia streets. And, being Benjamin Franklin, he decided to do something about it.

He wrote a paper explaining the benefits of street cleaning and sent out copies to every house in the city. Some of the benefits he touted included: “the greater Ease in keeping our Houses clean, so much Dirt not being brought in by People’s Feet; the Benefit to the Shops by more Custom, as Buyers could more easily get at them, and by not having in windy Weather the Dust blown in upon their Goods, &c. &c.”

After a couple of days, he started checking in with neighbors to see if they’d be willing to sign up to chip in sixpence a month for a street cleaner. The answer was a resounding YES: “It was unanimously sign’d, and for a time well executed. All the Inhabitants of the City were delighted with the Cleanliness of the Pavement that surrounded the Market, it being a Convenience to all.”

The power of a good argument and distribution strategy.

Things went downhill after Frankie, though. Inspired by New York’s founding of an official municipal cleaning department, Philadelphia tried to do something similar. But instead of hiring city employees to clean, Philly’s program was run by corrupt private contractors.

There were also some epic operational failures. Trash was collected by horse until the 1950s (think: manure probs) and then by open-backed trucks (think: trash spill probs). The city likely picked up its Filthadelphia (other good variants: Philthadelphia and Filthydelphia) nickname around this time, sometime in the 1930s. 

There was a brief glimmer of hope between the 1950s and 70s, but then things again took a turn for the worse.

Then, as mentioned above, street cleaning shut down completely in 2009.

This led to a new low. The volume of calls to the city 311 help line to report trash and dumping tripled between 2010 and 2017.

It’s a reality that was shocking to me when I moved to Philly in 2014. While parts of the city felt pretty clean – for example, Center City, including the beautiful areas around Rittenhouse Square and Independence Hall—others were downright grimy. In Kensington, the area I lived in, there was trash everywhere. And not just small bits of litter; people would dump bags of trash, tires, construction debris, old appliances, and even burnt-out cars. 

Image source. An example of Philly street litter.

Living surrounded by litter felt pretty awful. I could keep my apartment clean, but as soon as I stepped outside, the trash was inescapable everywhere you looked. Volunteering for a fledgling food coop, we would spend a whole afternoon cleaning the lot that the coop would eventually stand on, only to see it slide back into an unrecognizable state within a week. 

It felt futile.

I wasn’t alone in how I felt. Reading through accounts of Philadelphians talking about the city’s trash problems, the same issues – feelings of stress, hopelessness, and futility—kept popping up.

For example, one North Philly resident, who regularly picks up items dumped near his home described it like this: “There's so much trash in this city, sometimes I just say, ‘F— it. What's it gonna matter if I throw a bottle out of my car? It tends to suck you in, like an epidemic.”

Recently, a new study on Philadelphia litter caught my eye, bringing back these memories and starting me off on a trash reading journey.

The study examined what features make it more or less like that people will litter in an area. Next, we’ll look at the findings and talk about how they might be applied to help keep streets clean on dwindling city budgets.

Predicting litter

The study analyzed an open data set of measurements made by Philadelphia’s Streets Department. Between August and December 2017, city surveyors rated the amount of litter on 28,347 city blocks, covering around 95% of streets in the city.

The surveyors rated each block’s litter on a four-point scale:

1 = little to no litter, 

2 = litter in the amount that can be collected by a single person, 

3 = litter in the amount that would require collection by a team of people, 

4 = litter in the amount that would require collection by a large team of people and/or heavy machinery

Image source, from this pretty great training video. Piles of wood and home demolition debris clearly make this a “4”. 

For the purpose of analysis, the researchers divided the litter outcome into two categories: no or little litter (ratings of “1”) and litter (ratings above “1” ).

They then built a model to predict litter on each block from a number of candidate predictors. These included things like the number of days since the last garbage collection, the type of street the block was on, the time of year, and socioeconomic features of the neighborhood, among others. 

So, what actually predicted litter? 

  • Larger roads. Blocks that were on arterial roads and collector roads—roads that funnel traffic from local roads to arterial roads—had more litter than blocks on local roads. Larger roads have more traffic, so more chances for people to throw out trash onto the street.

  • Warmer weather. There was more litter on the streets in late summer and early fall than there was later in the year. People spend more time walking around when it’s warmer, so may be more likely to litter.

  • Nearby businesses that serve food. Blocks near restaurants, delis, and other businesses that serve food had more litter. Think: take-out containers. You eat your sandwich and fries and then have nowhere to put the trash.

  • Vacant lots. Blocks with more vacant lots nearby had more litter. Vacant lots are a good place to throw out something you don’t want with no one to see you.

  • Disadvantage. As measured by a higher proportion of residents on a block who were living below the poverty line, were unemployed, were receiving food assistance, or were single parents. Higher block disadvantage was linked with more litter. These areas are likely to have worse-quality infrastructure and fewer private community services. 

    Disadvantage also changed the relationship between some of the other factors described above and block litter. For example, the relationship between vacant properties and litter was weaker in disadvantaged areas – these areas already had so much working against them that adding a vacant lot did little to worsen the situation. Likewise, the relationship between businesses serving food and litter was also weaker in disadvantaged areas.

  • Parks. Finally, a good one. Blocks closer to a park were less likely to have litter. Recent efforts to involve community groups to keep parks clean may be paying off by discouraging local littering around the parks.

There were also some predictors that surprisingly didn’t show an effect. One of these was proximity to public garbage cans. Blocks close to garbage cans didn’t have less litter, which is weird given that prior work shows that availability and proximity of garbage cans reduces trash.

One reason for this finding might be because public garbage cans are unevenly distributed throughout the city. They’re denser in Center City, a wealthier area, and along arterial roads. If proximity to garbage cans always co-occurs with other factors, then it might be impossible to determine its effect in isolation.

What can we do?

I have a few ideas for how we can apply these findings to keep our cities clean. Maybe you have others? Let me know!

  • Require food-serving businesses to have ample private garbage cans. We’ve all seen the overflowing garbage cans near popular ice cream shops, take-out spots, or coffee shops. When someone litters, they’re on average only 29 feet from a garbage can, so those cans need to be everywhere. To minimize costs to the city and the likelihood that the patrons will dump their trash on the street, require each business that sells food-to-go to install and service garbage cans around the outside of their building.  

  • Focus more of the existing city services on disadvantaged areas. It’s no secret that municipal services aren’t doled out evenly. For example, the average Philly 311 call about trash will be resolved within 6 days in more-affluent Center City but will take 28 days to get resolved in disadvantaged North Philly. Cities could at the very least distribute cleaning and trash services evenly across neighborhoods.  

  • Busy streets have more car and foot traffic and aren’t “owned” by anybody in the same way that residents might feel ownership over small, local streets. But by getting together into cleaning cost-sharing groups (à la Ben Frankie), or more formalized business improvement districts, businesses on busier streets could all benefit from less litter. While the results were not strong enough to hold up with additional control variables, there was some indication that Philly business improvement districts (University City District and Center City District)—which pay for private street cleaning and trash removal—had less litter. 

  • Focus on parks. Parks are a great investment to public health, anyway, but their upkeep might also help keep the neighborhood clean. Setting up local community groups to help maintain parks could help in a couple ways besides the maintenance itself – park visitors would see their neighbors helping out and feel worse about littering, and those helping would likely feel a greater sense of ownership over the park and their neighborhood. But that doesn’t mean cities get off the hook, because someone has to do the daily maintenance of clearing garbage cans and cleaning up any large items (all the “4” projects on the litter index). 

  • Varied levels of cleaning throughout the year. I’m not sure to what degree cities plan for this already, but there should be more frequent deployment of cleaning services on the streets and in public spaces when it’s warm enough for people to spend time outdoors.

Philadelphia, 2.0

The litter probs in Philly continue. Earlier this year, the city ended an unbelievably-poorly-conceived pilot project to clean up streets with leaf blowers (it turned out to be as effective as it sounds). More recently, trash pickup delays have caused ‘horrible’ pest infestations

But, in the spirit of Ben Franklin, I hope Philly can come up with some better solutions now that it understands the problem it faces.

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