Make littering hurt again
Published 4:33 pm Tuesday, June 9, 2009
How bad is the economy? The economy is so bad that the state’s “Litter and It Will Hurt” campaign has been reduced to “Litter and It May Cause Some Minor Discomfort When Chucking That Gigantic Gulp Out The Car Window Without Properly Warming Up First.”
Washington’s Ecology Department said last month that cuts to the state budget mean more trash on state highways and fewer youths hired to clean them up. The Associated Press reported that in order to help make up a $9 billion deficit, the state budget will cut $4 million over the next two years from litter pickup and prevention programs, including “Litter and It Will Hurt” radio and TV spots.
“We’re going to be picking up less, and not preventing as much, and that will mean more litter,” Megan Warfield, Ecology’s former litter programs coordinator, told the AP. Her job was eliminated in the new budget.
The state will hire about 100 fewer youths for the Ecology Youth Corps, which put in about 35,000 hours in 2008 picking up bottles, cigarette butts and other trash. With the reduced staff, the youth corps will work 45 percent fewer hours this summer.
So $4 million over two years covered the salary of a litter coordinator and litter prevention and pickup programs? No wonder the job seemed expendable.
Washington relies on a litter tax on businesses to pay for waste reduction, recycling and litter control efforts. The state collected about $9.1 million in the fiscal year that ended June 2008, about 15 percent more than the previous year, AP reported. The new budget shifts $4 million from that account back to the general fund.
We’ll start the naive bidding:
Is it possible that because the economy is so bad people are spending less and therefore have less to litter?
Is it possible, because people are willing to sacrifice and change, and because the younger generation is more attuned to the environment, that they might litter less without state-sponsored threats of pain?
Well, it’s possible, but not probable.
Which is why if the state is going to have fewer youths picking up less trash, and nix litter prevention programs, it really needs to focus on enforcement, which is the “it will hurt” part of the promise, contained in state law, regardless of whether it is promoted as a not-quite-catchy campaign slogan.
The state’s anti-littering laws remain, as does the anti-litter hotline 866-LITTER1. Enforcement is not only educational, it puts money in the state coffers.
