Hope from Volunteers Moving Mountains

Adopt-A-Block volunteers are moving mountains, of litter that is. Litter is an on-going environmental problem and sometimes it may seem that for every bag of litter an Adopt-A-Block volunteer collects, there are two waiting for them the next day. It can be disheartening to see litter returned to a route that was just cleaned. And sometimes volunteers may feel that they are the only ones out there cleaning the mess, while many neighbors and community members are putting it there. While it may seem that there is no end in sight to the litter problem, there is a significant amount of work being done by Adopt-A-Block volunteers to greatly reduce it. In a recently 2010 survey, Adopt-A-Block asked their volunteers, “On average how much litter do you collect each month?” 59 Adopt-A-Block volunteers [out of 183 surveyed] reported to collect approximately 57 [114 AAB blue nylon bags] garbage bags of litter each month, totaling 684 garbage bags each year.


The amount of litter and time spent on adopted routes differ from person to person; yet, pulling in the numbers all together makes for a significant amount of litter no longer an eyesore in the community and no longer degrading the environment, such as entering into our waterways and disrupting aquatic habitats.

683 garbage bags of litter, however, seems like a whole lot of trash! While on one hand, this number of bags is impressive to report having been cleaned up by a small number of volunteers — it is on the other hand, a tremendous amount of litter to enter the environment in the first place. Considering that the average household puts out only one bag of garbage on the curb each week, making for 48 bags a year– 683 bags of litter accounts for a large amount of litterbugs in our community. This reveals the need to increase awareness to the problems of litter in the environment and the need for many to practice ecological citizenship. How do we reach the unconverted? It starts with being an example—working from your corner. Adopt-A-block would like to thank all their hard working volunteers for being an example to others in the community—demonstrating that litter is everyone’s responsibility and that we can all ‘pitch-in’ and make a difference towards the health and beauty of our environment.

Typical litter collected by volunteers on their adopted routes. [Picture taken by AAB Coordinator 2008].