By Margaret Vigorito-Litter Buster Coordinator
Congratulations to the 32 North Attleborough Litter Buster Volunteers for their continued work to improve the town’s beauty and cleanliness by picking up and disposing of 202 bags of trash in the neighborhoods in 2021. Keep North Attleboro Beautiful (KNAB) oversees the Litter Buster Volunteer Program.
Each volunteer adopts an area in town that they commit to cleaning up on a regular basis, with supplies provided by KNAB. Volunteers reported picking up a large volume of alcohol bottles, cans and nips, and fast food waste, as well as some larger items that need to be picked up by the Department of Public Works, such as tires and furniture.
Litter is costly to clean up, impacts quality of life, and economic development, and eventually ends up in waterways and oceans. In 2021, Keep America Beautiful released the largest study on litter in America.
Key Findings include:
- Nearly 50 billion pieces of litter along U.S. roadways and waterways
- Slightly more litter along waterways (25.9B) than roadways (23.7B)
- 152 items for each U.S. resident
- More than 2,000 pieces of litter per mile (both roadway and waterway)
- 90 percent of people surveyed believe litter is a problem in their state
- 6 billion pieces more than four inches in size
- Most littered items remain cigarette butts, but this litter is down almost 70 percent
- 207.1M PPE (personal protective equipment) items littered
To join the Litter Buster Volunteers, send an email to KNABlitterbusters@gmail.com. If you are not able to volunteer but are bothered by the sight of trash, take a trash bag during your neighborhood walk and pick up. Let’s all lead by example.
