The prevalence of litter today is mind-boggling. Trash here, trash there, trash everywhere, along the roadsides, parking lots and anywhere humans congregate. To borrow the title of TV commentator Chris Hayes’ podcast, why is this happening?
It’s 2024, and everyone should do better.
Louisiana, consistently ranked among the worst states for litter by the American State Litter Scorecard, is taking a significant step to tackle the problem by creating the LSU Litter Institute, perhaps the first of its kind in the U.S. Last October, John Bel Edwards, then Louisiana’s governor, along with legislators and representatives of Keep Louisiana Beautiful, announced the creation of the Institute, with a one-time grant of $800,000 for initial funding.
Mark Benfield, LSU professor of oceanography and coastal sciences, was appointed the Institute’s director. Since January, he has developed the outline for the Institute, which will serve as a clearing house for litter-related academic studies and press reports. During the first phase of the Institute’s work, that information, Benfield said, will be compiled into a form that is easy to understand.
“What we need is a deep dive into recent findings on different topics like bottle deposits, single-stream recycling and difficult to recycle products. We will then synthesize this into something that is understandable. If a municipality in Louisiana has some signage, or is doing something that has been successful, we want to showcase it.”
Benfield plans to hire an information specialist and a scientific writer to produce monthly reports. A subscription-based model will be created, as well as a publicly available source of information.
The second phase will be to test some of the findings and apply them in a test city. Benfield suggests the LSU campus, with about 45,000 students, faculty and employees, while not an actual city, will make a good first testing ground.
Benfield approaches his new endeavor from the perspective of studying marine science and oceanography. Landscape litter has more dire ramifications than just making the ground ugly.
“In many parts of the world, litter on the land is one or two rainfalls away from starting a journey to the ocean. Once in the waterways, it is extremely hard to remove. Once it’s in the ocean, it’s an incredibly long timeframe. If we are talking about plastics, we are talking about centuries.”
Referring to the devastation of Hurricane Helene, or any major hurricane for that matter, Benfield said the amount of debris mobilized by that storm is mind blowing, and exacerbates flooding problems when it gets washed into waterways. The litter itself leads to additional flooding. “Hurricanes complicate things.”
Litter is a critical problem in Baton Rouge and Louisiana in general, Benfield said. “There is litter all over the place. The majority of litter is because of human behavior. It is essentially a solvable problem, but not an easily solvable problem.”
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