Tarnishing the Beauty One Wrapper at a Time
New Orleans is one of the most beautiful cities in America. The live oaks arch over the avenues like cathedral ceilings. The shotgun houses line up in rows of candy-colored perfection. The wrought iron balconies drip with ferns and flowers. And underneath all of it, on nearly every sidewalk and neutral ground and street corner, there is trash. Because the litterers of New Orleans are relentless, shameless, and apparently allergic to the concept of a garbage can.
Walk down any block in any neighborhood and you will see the evidence. Fast food bags crumpled in the gutter. Styrofoam go-plates dissolving in the rain. Plastic cups from last night's daiquiri run scattered across the neutral ground like confetti from the worst parade in history. Single shoes, inexplicably. Always single shoes. The litterers of New Orleans do not discriminate by neighborhood or occasion. They are equal-opportunity polluters, leaving their mark on the Garden District and the Seventh Ward with identical disregard.
The Mardi Gras Excuse
Some of the litter is seasonal and, in the minds of its creators, forgivable. Mardi Gras generates mountains of trash — beads, cups, food wrappers, the occasional abandoned ladder — and the city mobilizes an army of sanitation workers to clean it up in the days after Fat Tuesday. That is a known quantity, a mess that comes with the territory of hosting the greatest free party in America. But the litterers who use Mardi Gras as their personal model for everyday behavior are a different story. They treat every Tuesday like it is Fat Tuesday, except without the music and the joy and the excuse.
The go-plate is a particular villain. New Orleans has a glorious tradition of takeout food, and the styrofoam container has been the delivery vehicle for po-boys, plate lunches, and late-night fried chicken for generations. But too many of those containers end up on the ground, in the storm drains, floating in the canals, wedged into the roots of oak trees. The go-plate is a symbol of New Orleans culinary excellence and New Orleans litter culture, simultaneously.
The Storm Drain Problem
Littering in New Orleans is not just an aesthetic offense. It is a practical crisis. The city's drainage system, already strained to its limits by geography and age, depends on catch basins and canals to move rainwater out of neighborhoods and toward the pumping stations. When those catch basins clog with trash — and they clog constantly — the water backs up, and streets flood. Not because of a hurricane. Not because of a broken pump. Because someone threw a bag of Popeyes bones on the ground instead of walking ten feet to a trash can.
Every neighborhood flood that could have been prevented by a functioning catch basin is, in part, the fault of the litterers. It is a direct line from the chip bag in the gutter to the water in your living room, and yet the behavior continues, day after day, block after block, as if the connection between litter and flooding is a secret that nobody has bothered to share.
Pick It Up
The good news is that New Orleans has no shortage of people who care. Neighborhood cleanup groups organize regularly. Volunteers in rubber gloves wade through ditches on Saturday mornings. Organizations work tirelessly to keep the city clean, or at least cleaner than it would be without them. They are fighting a battle that never ends, against an opponent that never tires, armed with nothing but trash bags and the stubborn belief that this city deserves better. It does. Pick it up.
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