Reducing litter ain't about slogans

Yesterday's Baltimore Sun has an article about the current Mayor of Baltimore, Sheila Dixon, and the quest to find a new slogan about litter. See "Getting city to pick it up." From the article:

Anyone remember the Trash Bash jingle?How about "Baltimore Sparkle?" Or Trash ball? Those rubber garbage cans embellished with "Believe"? A stroll down memory lane, in Baltimore's case, is littered with failed cleanup initiatives.As it is everywhere.

Ever since that lone tear rolled down the Indian's cheek in the famous 1970s commercial, national and local campaigns have used guilt, humor, bullying, goofy slogans, goofier mascots and celebrity endorsements in an attempt to get it through America's slovenly skull that littering is bad, garbage cans are good.

Yet chip bags, soda cans and chewed gum pile up on the street. And plastic bags blowing around are a constant reminder that the message has yet to sink in.

It's not about slogans. It's about changing people's behavior. (See "Don't Mess With Texas" and below.) Slogans tend to only impact the people who are already likely to be against littering. Since they aren't the ones littering, the messages are misdirected.

Why is it that research on best practices and application rarely makes it into the practices of government?

Below is an entry I wrote about litter from March or April 2005. Note that a couple of the links might not work, and since then I have found a much better Litter Survey Form, best in the world probably, from Keep Australia Beautiful.

Those of us of a certain age must remember this anti-litter promotion campaign from the early 1970s. This thread comes from a neighborhood email list and has been edited slightly.

Last Thursday's Washington Post District Extra section published an article by Bridget Murray Law, about her concern with the lack of "cleanliness" on H Street NE, and her experiences going out on her own, picking up trash off the street and sidewalks.

From the piece:

For example, the H Street Main Street project, which has long-term plans to help revitalize the corridor, has organized monthly neighborhood cleanups on Saturday mornings. It even provided brooms, trash bags and other trash-busters to the volunteers. But the effort has been suspended because, said project director Tim Lewis, it was "a lot of work, with minimal impact." Lewis is instead looking to raise funds and partner with businesses and the city to improve trash removal.

The attitude of the neighborhood Main Street program towards community involvement seems to be a little rusty and backwards looking. (Flickr photo by jmorgan.)

Richard Layman replies:

The clean-ups started in response to residents in the area of 9th, 10th, and I Streets and their frustration with the lack of cleanliness in the area--and as people know the blocks bordering H Street (the 700 block south and the 800 block north tend to be trashy as a result of windblown and other refuse that makes its way to the residential streets from the H Street commercial corridor).

At the time I was Promotions Committee chair for HSMS, and I felta duty to respond. (Technically, street cleanliness is part of the Design committee of Main Street, but Promotions deals with "Image Development" and certainly the level of cleanliness on H Street is the utmost shaper of "image.")

Obviously, they were right. So we did. I didn't want to do cleanups for all the same kinds of things that people said to Bridget Law Murray. But we did them anyway, and there were three things that were so important, that came about as a result. (Plus, surprisingly, it was fun, but less fun when only a few people came out.)

1. There was visibility for the HSMS program. Granted, with a little bit of money, one staff member, and a lot of volunteers but with limited time, and a big agenda, it's hard sometimes to show efforts. Well, that effort had visibility.

2. It was an amazing community building (and recruiting) exercise. People came out who hadn't come out before, we met people new to us (not necessarily new to the neighborhood) from all over the neighborhood, we talked, we made friendships, we came up with ideas, we built better relationships with some of the store owners, with ANC commissioners, recruited volunteers, it helped us build relationships and visibility with other city agencies such as DPW, etc.

There were other benefits too. One was that it motivated us to work with the Courts to get volunteers that needed to perform community service. We finally got that going the last month or so of my being in HSMS.

3. More importantly, I got a much better understanding of the "etiology of trash" on H Street and how to interdict it. That learning has been ignored, natch, because HSMS doesn't seem to be a knowledge-appreciative organization, but it has been laid out in various emails/papers (including the recap of emails from last August in my blog entry on March 8th about H Street). Basically, most of the trash is generated at and around the bus stops*, particularly the transfer points at 6th and at 8th Streets*, the parking lots by the stops (Autozone, H Street Connection, and Murry's), and the loitering that is masked by the bus transfer stops. (This is a problem not just on H Street--K and 8th Streets NW with four bus stops is also quite dirty.)

(Photo by Zenia, from Flickr.)

Based on that learning, I got a commitment from Dan Tangherlini of DDOT and hopefully other members of DDOT to come out for the November 2004 cleanup, so they could see this problem first hand. (Well, not if DPW would have come out and done a particularly excellent job the night before, which likely would have happened.) But since I was kicked off the board in October, and since there was no strategy in place to maintain any of the promotional efforts (articles in Voice of the Hill, promotional ads, events, cleanups, business directory, etc.) after I was removed, all these efforts ground to a halt.

Anyway, below are pieces of five emails about this issue, spanning from last July to February this year (I still have my hand in trying to make H Street a better place, although I am not involved in HSMS).

Minimal impact?

Photo from the Washington Post. Bridget Law Murray in front of 406 H Street--a building that has been vacant at least 20 years. The building is owned by John Formant of Formant Real Estate, on the 200 block of Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast. His mother had a real estate office on H Street back in the 1950s.

Below are some snippets from organizing emails addressing cleanliness issues in the H Street neighborhood of northeast Washington DC.

Johannesburg example (email from 2/2005)
I never did like "Put it in the Can" [as a slogan] which is why I never replied before... anyway I am reading the book Urban Fortunes: A Political Economy of Place which is an important, important book in terms of thinking about a variety of place issues. Among many important points, it makes some important arguments about why people may not possess a sense of ownership about their community, and this of course impacts litter etc.

Because of a mention in an article in the New York Times about their new tourism development strategy, I am poking around the City of Johannesburg website. Think about it, that city certainly has some "marketing" issues... (one of the papers on the site is the "Soweto retail strategy" etc.)

They have a clean up campaign that I think strikes a good note from a tagline perspective:

Clean City, Proud City.

Don't Trash the Future" from their "Pikitup" garbage collection company is another possible slogan. How about "Clean City, Proud City. Don't Trash the Future!" etc.

A search for the cleanest school in Johannesburg is an example that we could use in DC and in the neighborhood (we could have an intra-neighborhood competition) Their program is about a lot more than litter, with a great slogan besides. You could try to bring it down to the micro level: Clean H Street, Proud H Street, wordsmith it, etc.

Measuring Physical indicators (1/2005)
Very interesting. Here are three links of programs using the Keep America Beautiful Litter Index.

-- Winston-Salem Litter Index
-- Keep Kansas City Beautiful Litter Index
-- Ivanhoe Neighborhood Block-by-Block Analysis (KKCB)

As Peters and Waterman said inIn Search of Excellence, "what gets measured, gets done."

Elementary School campus cleanups (July 2004)

I would also like to try to do the "campus cleanups" with the elementary schools, say once in the fall and one in the winter. Yesterday I (along with Vanessa) went to Artscape in Baltimore. Many nonprofits with art-related components exhibited. One had a couple videos produced by kids (I didn't buy it but we can). Also there are various video projects in DC...

WRT Philly, I find the UCD [University City District] model very interesting (no tax increment financing, all contributions by organizations such as Penn that find it in their interest to have a solid community), but one of the subtle things I noticed is that UCD also does cleaning as "fee for service" on certain pieces of private property. Certainly, this is in order for H Street Connection and the Murry's parking lot.... [and AutoZone].

Anti-littering video project (July 2004)

Joe Tortorici is the coordinator of the Promotions Committee's efforts on street cleanups. Joe would rather address this issue more broadly and systemically. We have been looking at the Don't Mess With Texas anti-litter website from the Texas Dept. of Transportation, because they are well-known for the success of their anti-litter program.

The website, under Education and Research, discusses a video that they developed and sent to all the jr and sr high schools in the state.

We are thinking that we need to try to develop such a video here, more "hip hop" I imagine.

Separately, we are trying to engage local high school students (probably from Spingarn, Eastern, and Dunbar) in community service projects and this could be a great project to get them involved, and to have some lasting impact.

You mentioned that you work in video-television....

What do you think?

Don’t Mess with Texas (July 2004)

Campus Cleanup. Although this was done at the college level, this can probably be done at the elementary school level with great positive impact. We've got to get to these children while they are young. This is another project that high school community service students (in addition to the "hip hop" video mentioned in the other email) could coordinate within our neighborhood for Wilson, Miner, and Ludlow-Taylor. We can expand it from there.....

Depending on if you want to make this "your project" we could do it more broadly via the "Citizens Planning Coalition." CPC was last most active on the MCI Center issue, but Mary and I are working on relaunching it. The long slogan is "linking planning to historic preservation, urban design, transportation, and quality of life advocacy." The short slogan is "making planning mean placemaking."

Dealing with litter is certainly a quality of life issue.

Also, within Near Northeast Citizens, we are working to develop a "Public Spaces" committee, and that nascent group can be engaged on this.

We can probably get some funding from our local ANCs (6A and 6C), for some of these projects.

There is also the local chapter of Keep America Beautiful. I don't know what kind of assistance they can provide. As well as DPW. Maybe even DDOT and the DMV (The "Report a Litterer" campaign). As far as DMV goes, according to Mary, the "new director" (one year) is a well-accomplished administrator.

We can probably get these three agencies to work with us in a coordinated fashion...

Litter Coalition in Philly (July 2004)

-- maybe you can call 'em, get a copy of their pledge, etc.