'There is value in the litter stream.' Can cleaning up litter improve Tennessee’s economy?
MEMPHIS, Tenn. – When the Tennessee Wildlife Federation asked people a few years ago to send in photos of litter in their communities, the response was overwhelming. TWF was deluged by photos of animals chewing on trash, litter by the side of the road and bottles and beer cans in lakes and streams.
People, it turns out, are passionate about litter, said federation CEO Michael Butler.
And they have good reason to be. While an individual piece of litter may seem innocuous, there are hundreds of millions of pieces thrown into Tennessee’s waterways, roads and green spaces annually. Together, these items of litter cost millions of taxpayer dollars to clean up, pollute lakes and rivers, devalue crops and livestock, and hamper local tourism economies.
“It costs (Tennessee) lots of money,” Butler said. “We estimate the impact of litter on the agricultural community to be $50 (million) to $60 million a year... when you look at tourism, it is a big issue. Talk to your county mayors in rural Tennessee.”
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Plastic bags can get sucked into combines, damaging machinery or ending up in the food fed to livestock, sickening the animals. They can also end up in cotton bales, decreasing the value when a farmer tries to sell their product.
Litter in Tennessee’s wild places can drive down tourism, Butler said, while litter in cities can drive away new businesses, with employers judging the workforce based on the appearance of a city. In addition, the Tennessee Department of Transportation alone spends $19 million each year on litter programs.
“There are real costs associated with having litter just willy-nilly on the ground. And it's something that can be addressed and fixed,” Butler said.
How to address it is something currently being studied on a wider scale after the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations recently voted to begin a study of litter pollution in the state. The study marks the first statewide action on litter control in decades.
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‘A true circular economy'
While the environmental and aesthetic reasons for litter remediation are more obvious, Butler also said it could be a boon for business.
“There is value in the litter stream. There's plastic, it can be reused, there's glass, that can be reused, there's aluminum, that can be reused. And in some cases there are other items that can be reused,” he said.
Laura Hennemann, vice president of marketing and communications for Strategic Materials, the largest glass recycler in North America, said glass alone can be repurposed for glass container manufacturing, fiberglass insulation, highway bed and other items.
“Our customers’ appetite for recycled glass is increasing. The demand for recycled glass in regions like the southeastern U.S. currently exceeds supply,” she said. “We need more glass into our plants, which means we need to increase glass recovery rates.”
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Some Tennessee companies are having to source trash from California and even Japan, Butler said.
“There are a lot of corporations that we’re engaged in talking with… that are committed to what we're calling the circular economy because it's part of their ethos as a company,” he said. “The question is how do you get from where we are to what we need to address the problem."
Strategic Materials sells to companies in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, including Anchor Glass, Owens Corning, CertainTeed, Johns Manville and Knauf Insulation in the Southeast. Many of the company’s customers produce glass containers or fiberglass. Using recycled glass reduces the need for virgin mined materials — like sand, which has been in short supply recently — but also results in energy savings, reducing costs and carbon dioxide emissions, Hennemann said.
“Glass creates a true circular economy because it is 100% recyclable forever,” she said. “By increasing glass recovery rates in Tennessee, it benefits the environment and economy because, for every 100 tons of glass recycled, eight jobs are supported — and that’s just representing one material. Imagine the opportunities with other recyclable materials like paper, plastic and aluminum.”
Environmental concerns
One company using recycled plastic in manufacturing is Patagonia, Nashville, Tennessee, store manager Matt Heinly said. And plastic, in particular, is a problem in the Volunteer State’s waterways.
The Tennessee River is one of the most biodiverse rivers in the world. It also contains more microplastics than any other studied river in the world, including the Yangtze River in China. Every second, 32 million pieces of microplastics are dumped from the Tennessee River into the Ohio River, according to TWF.
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Heinly said people are increasingly aware plastic waste in water negatively impacts the water they consume, something that concerns people of all political persuasions.
“More and more Tennessee voters are realizing that clean water and clean land and clean air, clean energy, are bipartisan issues,” he said. “I think we're starting to see that more people in Tennessee are becoming more and more aware of the threat that climate change poses to our local economy.”
Missy Marshall, executive director of Keep Tennessee Beautiful, said solving the litter problem will require both education and enforcement of existing litter laws. Litter isn’t just throwing a candy bar wrapper out the window from the highway, she said. It’s also when vehicles taking large pieces of household waste to landfills don’t follow tarping regulations, and couches or toilets end up falling out of the truck.
It's a safety hazard and it impacts tourism-dependent economies, she said.
“In a lot of communities across the state... their number one assets are their natural resources,” Marshall said. “You’re spending your family's hard-earned money — for some people that might be their only vacation — and they want to go enjoy the natural resources. They're less likely to return if they're seeing litter at the lake and in our streets.”
Goals, not solutions
Wolf River Conservancy executive director Keith Cole said the organization has organized litter cleanup after litter cleanup, including at common illegal dumping sites around Memphis. Sometimes, conservancy staff would come back later and see more litter at the same spots, a somewhat deflating sight.
But Cole said exposing people to the scope of the problem and providing education about litter can help prevent it. He also said small actions — he and his wife take bags with them on walks to collect trash — can inspire changes in others.
“I think certainly setting an example, whether it's through the Wolf River Conservancy and volunteer efforts or through personal efforts is a good way to start,” he said.
The Wolf River Conservancy is also part of Tennessee CLEAN, and the group has put forward draft legislation that Butler describes as presenting measurable goals, not solutions.
The Tennessee CLEAN Act has three goals: creating a program to recover 85% of single-use containers sold in Tennessee; develop a program to address single-use plastic and paper bags; and develop a comprehensive litter program to be implemented in three to four years.
A commission of private sector representatives, municipal and county government officials and agricultural representatives would develop the policies to achieve those goals.
“The best way we've come up with is to create a process that has goals, which would be in line with… the purpose of policymaking and state government, let the marketplace come up with those solutions and get innovative about fixing it,” he said. “That’s the real method to our madness.”