KickButt Columbus! litter collection back after pandemic hiatus
The birds are chirping, the sun is shining and … the trash is everywhere.
It’s a common scene this time of year. As the snow melts each spring, Columbus residents are reminded about what lay beneath that beautiful white blanket all winter – litter.
All that garbage is what brought more than 250 volunteers out to Wolfe Park on the city’s East Side Saturday morning to team up for KickButt Columbus!, a litter collection effort run by Columbus Department of Public Service’s Keep Columbus Beautiful program.
The volunteers were sent out in small groups to help clean up 33 entrance and exit ramps along Interstate 70, Interstate 71, Route 315 and Route 104, all inside the Interstate 270 outer belt.
Aryeh Alex, manager of Keep Columbus Beautiful, said Saturday’s event was the kick off of a month full of litter cleanup programming, all leading up to Earth Day on April 22. It was also the first KickButt Columbus! cleanup held by the city since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“We had people calling our office who were so excited to see the cleanup was back this year,” Alex said.
Even with a diminished capacity due to the pandemic, Keep Columbus Beautiful had 11,000 volunteers last year collect 250,000 pounds of litter. For every person living in Columbus, Alex said there are approximately 152 pieces of litter.
Alex said the small window of time between when the snow has melted and the foliage starts to bloom is the perfect opportunity to get as much trash cleaned up as possible because it’s all visible and easily accessible.
And the city’s entrance and exit ramps are great places to start because they often are the first things people see when they’re entering a neighborhood, Alex said.
“People see trash and associate that with the community,” he said. “If you pick up the litter at these intersections, people feel less inclined to litter. But if it’s there, people think, ‘What’s one more piece?'”
Volunteers donned neon safety vests and used long-handled grabbers to collect trash along the ramps. Crews from the Ohio Department of Transportation and the city were slated to collect the trash bags after the event was over.
One of the teams out cleaning on the East Side was a family affair. Varsey Laurelle showed up with her aunts Cheralee Calhoun and Janice Hinton as well as her cousin Alex Hinton. Together they braved Saturday morning’s blustery winds to pick up litter by the intersections of James Road and Interstate 70.
Laurelle, who lives in Eastmoor, said she specifically signed up to clean this intersection because it’s one of the entry points to her neighborhood.
“This is my community, and I want to give back,” she said.
Calhoun said she often runs through the area with the Columbus chapter of Black Girls Run!, and she hates seeing all the trash lying around this time of year.
Just walking along the exit ramp from Interstate 70 to James Road, the women picked up: bags and cups from Wendy’s, Sonic, Raising Cane’s and White Castle; pop cans, juice bottles, glass beer bottles, Kool-Aid Jammers, Styrofoam cups and several half-full bottles of water; candy wrappers, a box of Fruit Roll-ups, chip bags, plastic grocery bags, busted hub caps, cardboard boxes and cigarette butts. (Alex said cigarette butts are the most littered item in the U.S.)
Laurelle said she was amazed by how much trash they saw just walking up to the ramps.
“We started wondering, ‘How does all this get here?’ And to think that there’s this much trash at just one exit,” she said. “It makes you think about how much trash there is at all the exits — and in the city and across the state.”
Someone has to clean it up, she said. Laurelle said she was proud to get to clean up her community with her family.
After just about 15 minutes, Laurelle pointed out the visible difference between the area where they’d collected litter and the spots they had yet to clean.
“Would you look at that!” Calhoun said to Laurelle.
“That’s incredible,” Laurelle replied. “Now that’s a real sense of pride.”
Sheridan Hendrix is a higher education reporter at the Columbus Dispatch. You can reach her at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter at @sheridan120. Sign up for her Mobile Newsroom newsletter here and her education newsletter here
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