Picking up Litter in Parks
By: K Ann
Tags: Parks And Recreation, Litter, Park Ranger, Parks, Cigarette Butts

I work for a park with over 8,000 acres of protected open space in a small valley between two larger cities. This park has a lake with miles of sandy beaches and several miles of hiking trails. Park visitors can camp, boat, picnic, swim, paint, or hike.

I’ve worked in five different parks, and have spent most of my life working outside. One of the job duties I’ve done the most consistently is pick up litter. At a small park in Southeastern Utah, I would walk a nature trail and an overlook trail almost daily and I never came back empty-handed. While picking up litter, I wore leather gloves and carried a five-gallon bucket.

The view never got old.

I would walk through the campground on my cleaning shifts and I developed a routine that I still use almost fifteen years later. On my first loop through the campground, I would pick up litter, including the trash that people threw in the fire pits instead of finding a trash can or dumpster. Then I would empty the fire pits and charcoal grills before finally sweeping sand off the concrete pad and wiping down each picnic table.

Occasionally I would have to clean up a campsite after a raven got into the campers’ food supply. People love to use those white styrofoam coolers because they are cheap and light. Ravens also love those white styrofoam coolers because they are easy to rip apart to get to the food inside! The desert wind can carry pieces of styrofoam an impressive distance. I was, and still am, in pretty good shape from all the walking I do for my job.

When I eventually moved on to a different park in a new area, I had to learn a whole new set of skills, including using a chainsaw, building and fixing barbed wire fencing, and shooting a cannon. This was a historic park with a campground and hiking trails. There was one job duty I did not have to learn and that was picking up litter.

Trail work.

At this new park, I used the same basic routine I had developed in the last campground, walking through sites, picking up litter, clearing fire pits, washing picnic tables. If people are paying $15 per night or more for a campsite, it should at least be clean and nice when they arrive.

My current park, the lake, is very similar to the other parks. New job, new duties, and new skills to learn, but the litter pickup remains constant. During the busy season, I walk through the main day use/picnic area and beaches picking up litter off the beach and on each side of the road.

It never ceases to amaze me that I can pick up a full five-gallon bucket of trash on a Saturday morning, another on Sunday morning, and slightly less on Monday morning. There is always more litter on holiday weekends, but I think at least when park visitors arrive early in the day, they have a clean park to start with.

Most of the trash is pretty innocent, like the napkins and clear plastic straw covers that blow away when the wind picks up every summer afternoon. The one type of litter that I find more of than anything else consistently, is cigarette butts.

If we go without picking up litter for more than a few days, our nicest beach starts looking like an ashtray. I’m not sure what causes people who smoke to drop their butts on the ground without a second thought. I think maybe people don’t even consider it littering because cigarette butts are so small, but they do build up quickly in certain areas.

Through the years, I’ve noticed something about cigarette butts. They seem to build up in parking lots, at overlooks, in front of the restrooms, under picnic tables, and at trailheads. I’ve found a few here and there along our hiking trails, but they are much more common in areas where people are known to linger.

A cigarette butt-free campsite!

I’ve been working for this park for almost seven years now and I’m happy here, but I know one thing for sure. If I do eventually move on to another park, there will be new skills to learn along with new job duties, but the litter pick-up will remain the same.