Litter meets its match

Published 1:30 am Monday, October 30, 2017

An ordinary citizen calls for help. A spot near their home with excessive litter.

A crew shows up. They stand out, in reflective orange hats and vests — long-handled grabbing tools at their sides, ready to claw.

It’s time to clean up this town.

The Snohomish County Litter Wranglers finish their first clean-up season this week. And the upstart crew has been a mighty fine success in the eyes of those they help, and those who hire them.

If laid end-to-end, the number of road miles cleaned by the Litter Wranglers since the end of April would stretch from Everett to within striking range of Missoula, Montana — nearly 440 miles.

That’s more than one-quarter of the roadways Snohomish County manages.

“It has gone far beyond my expectations and it has become an invaluable part of our day-to-day operations,” Snohomish County Solid Waste Director Matt Zybas said in a press release.

In all, Wranglers rounded up more than 4,300 bags of litter.

Somebody’s got to do the dirty work.

As Casey Jones told reporter Noah Haglund earlier this year: “We go where the garbage is.”

Besides keeping the environs pretty-like, the Wranglers enable road maintenance crews to stay focused on maintenance and repairs.

The pilot effort — more officially called the Clean Sweep Litter Program — will return in the spring.