Trashing North Carolina

For going on six decades now I’ve had a love affair with my home state. I’m biased, I’ll admit right up front, but I think we’ve been blessed with an incredibly beautiful place to live and work. Except for a few years in the Army and newspapering in Northern Virginia, I’ve lived in this old state all my life and cannot imagine a prettier place.

And yet: I know this marks me as a geezer beyond all redemption, but North Carolina is also a dadgum mess.

Amid all this beauty we also see astonishing ugliness in the form of huge amounts of roadside trash that collectively challenge our sense of values. We North Carolinians like to believe that we revere our environment, and most of us do. But many do not, fouling it every day by tossing trash out the car window or allowing it to blow or fall out of whatever it’s being hauled in.

It’s astonishing what you see along our roadsides and waterways. Almost every time we head east of Raleigh on I-40, my nominee for trashiest highway in the state, we see all manner of junk – parts of coolers, strips of tires, the occasional piece of furniture, old 5-gallon buckets and a flood of bottles and cans and the like. I’m reminded of all this by a recent News & Observer package on roadside litter, written by Matthew Eisley (story). There is, he noted, "a startling, some say embarrasing, amount of highway litter."

It’s everywhere. My daughter once pulled a washing machine out of the Swannanoa River when she was at Warren Wilson College near Asheville on a cleanup workday. The last time we joined a river cleanup with the Neuse River Foundation, we hauled in roofing shingles, pieces of lawn furniture, enough beer bottles to have catered a lacrosse team party and a raft of paper cartons, napkins, bags, tissue and, as Andy Griffith would say, I don’t know what-all.

When I head up to Millbrook Road in Raleigh for my early morning walks, the empty bottles, cigarette packs and plastic and paper bags seem to mushroom on weekends. Sometimes I fill up a plastic bag with the mess before I’ve gone two blocks.

A fellow named Elmer Eddy lives near Jacksonville and puts his canoe in the water to hunt trash. He has, I believed, pulled out tons of trash from the White Oak River and other waterways of Eastern North Carolina.

I’ve always thought a bottle redemption law would be part of the answer to messy roadsides. But requiring a refundable deposit on bottles and cans would only get at part of the problem – the stuff folks willingly toss out the window. It wouldn’t get at the stuff that blows accidentally out of construction or debris trucks. The state occasionally writes a ticket for the heavy stuff, but not often – less than once a month, Dianne Whitacre of The Charlotte Observer reported last year (story). Nine of them got off.

I don’t know if the answer is a campaign like the Don’t-Mess-With Texas program the Lone Star State launched some years ago, or a bottle and can redemption bill, or a crackdown by law enforcement, or all the above. Maybe we ought to hold a messiest roadside contest. Send me your nominees, and pictures if you have them. Perhaps we can get folks to understand how roadsides really look.

I do know that there are a lot of volunteer cleanup efforts under way every day. The state spends millions of dollars cleaning up when it might otherwise put that money to use repaving highways or otherwise keeping up with construction backlogs.

And I do know this: For a beautiful state, we’re just a mess.