This year’s community spring cleaning feels the clutches of a record-setting winter
- Mark Sabbatini
- 57 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Litter Free’s annual cleanup again lures lots of volunteers throughout town, but pickings are tough in many areas due to lingering ice and snow
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
A tattered blanket was still lying by the roadside of an area Wayne Jensen had just walked by with his trash bag and claw, but he said it wasn’t an oversight — just one among many pieces of litter that aren’t going anywhere for a while because they’re frozen to the berms and ice on the ground after this winter’s record snowfall.
"It’s impossible because the snow berm is just ice," he said Saturday morning about an hour into the annual Little Free Inc. Community Cleanup. "I tried to pull some stuff out of it — in fact, there was a blanket just back there — I need a shovel or something to get it out. It’s going to be a couple of weeks before we’re going to be able to get all this stuff. There’s probably more under these berms."
Even so, Jensen estimated he had cleaned up 30 or 40 pounds of trash along the side of Glacier Highway. He and about 20 others affiliated with the Rotary Club of Juneau signed up to clear the roughly one-mile stretch of the highway between Egan Drive and the turnoff to Costco.
Hundreds of others in Juneau picked up items small and large during the six-hour cleanup that resulted in stacks of yellow bags being placed along roads for pickup throughout town. A total of 755 volunteers signed up for this year’s cleanup, according to John King, president of Litter Free’s board.
"We won't know the total amount of garbage picked up until sometime next week because some of the bags will get there on Monday," he stated in an email Saturday night. "The landfill has everything from this event in separate containers that they will weigh next week."
Last year’s cleanup resulted in more than 30,000 pounds of trash being delivered to Juneau’s landfill, but organizers aren’t necessarily expecting to match that total this year due to the snowpack.
"We had a couple of board meetings about, ‘Do we postpone? Do we not?’" said Will Gisler, a Litter Free board member, at a signup and trash bag distribution site in Lemon Creek. "We thought for the most part that once the date is out there people kind of lock it in so it's better to just leave it. There's some kind of secondary cleanup-type events going on throughout the year, so they'll probably get a little more trash than they did in years past and we'll probably get a little bit less picked up today."
Among the cleanups that will take place later this year is the Southeast Alaska Land Trust’s wetlands cleanup that normally takes place on the same day as Litter Free’s event. But this year, due to the snow, the land conservation group rescheduled its spring cleanup for Saturday, May 16, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
While some people and groups targeted specific spots, others just stopped where they saw areas needing cleaning up. Luke Kirkham, picking up trash bags for himself and his girlfriend, said they were likely to go back to a roadside he spotted while driving to the signup station.
"I noticed the overpass for where you get off Egan going into town, that overpass is pretty littered," he said.
Kirkham said he’s tried to participate in the cleanups during the years he’s been in Juneau — and appreciates the effort given the litter situation he’s seen in some other places such as when he spent a summer abroad studying in Senegal.
"We have places in the United States where there's definitely way too much litter and I think it's kind of a shame," he said. "I can imagine people are just like, ‘I don't want to carry this wrapper 200 feet to the nearest trash can.’ But (in Senegal) my taxi driver just drinks his water out of a bag and just throws it out the window. And their tideline is just all trash and it's just everywhere, it's just massive. So that's one thing to kind of try to keep in perspective is we get a good amount of litter. But I mean culturally it's not at all the same."
A group of several neighbors got together to clean up an abandoned homeless campsite in a meadow in Lemon Creek. That meant in addition to the familiar stack of yellow trash bags there were propane tanks, a large pile of metal framing, bags of recyclables and some items in salvageable condition participants said they planned to drop off at a thrift shop.
Leanne Dapcevich said she’s participated in past Litter Free cleanups and was wondering if this year’s might be happening a bit too early due to all the snow still on the ground. But when a neighbor asked about clearing the campsite under a group of trees she readily signed on since she’s been passing by the collection of debris and waste near her house every day for months, and it seemed an opportune time for a quick improvement.
"Hopefully an hour with everybody here," she said. "We'll have to come back because some stuff is still frozen."
Larry Olson, who’s picked up trash in recreational areas out the road in past years, said he organized the campsite cleanup because the people living there last summer abandoned it when the weather turned cold. He said he put up signs around the neighborhood asking for help and then came out earlier during the week to make sure people would be able to mostly clear the area.
"Site prep is everything," he said. "So I cut off a bunch of branches because this was really undercover and then moved some of the tarps so that it would melt. Snow is a big deal. But under here, I thought this would be good."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
