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support for this program is provided by the foundation for excellence in louisiana public broadcasting and from viewers like you [Music] hello and welcome to louisiana public square i'm beth courtney president of lpb joining me to moderate tonight's episode is barry irwin ceo of the council for a better louisiana thanks beth as always it's great to be here if you were to look into the origins of the word litter you discover it's derived from the latin word for bed this eventually gave rise to other definitions of litter like the straw and hay thrown down his bedding for pets it wasn't a great great leap for litter to ultimately encompass the layers of trash that cover our roads and choke our waterways well this is truly a bed that we have made and now have to lie in over 80 percent of litter is intentional cigarette butts plastic bottles and bags tossed by pedestrians and drivers it's also costly it is estimated that louisiana taxpayers spend 40 million dollars annually on litter removal and enforcement tonight we will examine the extent of the problem and the role of government and residents in combating it we start with a story from the capital city to see how trash makes its way into our watersheds hidden among the 440 acres of green space at lsu's burden gardens is an 81 ton eyesore the largest hot spot is about an acre of accumulation of aquatic trash those areas are mostly styrofoam and plastic bottles other areas such as this behind me is a mixture of about everything that floats jeffrey keaney oversees the botanical gardens he says the litter has collected over 50 years and is nearly 20 feet deep when i came out here 10 years ago as director i really walked the property and started researching you know what is this property about and when i walked out here and saw all this litter i thought oh my god is did we dump this back here and after i investigated a little further i realized that this didn't come from lsu or my staff this came from the people of baton rouge this 30 acre wetlands is connected to ward creek and ward creek is the major artery that drains most of the storm water out of east baton rouge parish rain events carry tossed litter into storm drains the water then travels into the wetlands leaving trash behind as it recedes it's not only an aesthetics issue but an economic one the litter can trigger flooding like the city saw in 2016. and so our wetlands instead of being able to hold water eventually collect soil and layers of aquatic trash and so they're not able to take in all of that storm water that they naturally were able to many many years ago keaney says baton rouge's storm water management program which all cities must file with the feds hasn't adequately addressed the problem we have not been taking care of it properly for many years this is evidence of it epa knows about it now deq is involved in it too and so the city has to do something about it not just for our local population but it's being mandated he points to lafayette as a success story for its handling of bayou vermillion they actually have a millage that's collected to keep that trash out of their bayou and so that's a very good example of what we need to do across the state just educating the public that we can't throw out our cans in our plastic bottles is not going to solve the problem we're going to have to have equipment placed in our white lens our canals and our channels in order to remove that litter out of our wetlands and prevent it from creating issues like we have here wow that's amazing joining us in the studio to give an overview of louisiana's litter problem is our first panel susan russell is the executive director of keep louisiana beautiful stephanie regal is the editor of the baton rouge business report and recently wrote a cover story on the capital city's litter issues and dr mark benfield is with lsu's department of oceanography and coastal sciences he started globally tracking a new class of covid related litter thanks everybody for joining us and really glad to have you here with us susan i'd like to start with you um how does louisiana's litter prevention and abatement strategy stack up to other states and what more would you like to see us do here in louisiana well barry the truth is we really do not have a comprehensive statewide strategy and that is really why we're in the problem you know that we face now and so when you think of how expansive this problem is it doesn't discriminate it's in every parish in our state it affects all 4.7 million citizens it's in rural areas it's problems in large cities black white young old it makes no difference it affects us all and so when you think of something that is that detrimental to our state when it affects our business community and growth and tourism and wildlife and marine life and i can go on and on um i don't know that there's another problem that is really not being addressed the way it should be we really need our stakeholders all together to come up with a statewide comprehensive litter abatement plan and we need input from our educators from enforcement from our business community our local government our state government cross-section of all of our communities to sit down and do the hard work that's needed to create a statewide comprehensive plan and figure out how to fund it we hear about litter hot spots could you tell us a little bit about what we're talking about with litter hot spots hot spots in every community you're going to find on roadways u-turns you're going to find them wherever wind and rain will will blow uh litter at the end of dead-end streets where people aren't watching you know new orleans eats has a huge problem with dumping because it's an area that nobody watches and litiga gets litter and so does dumping and so it starts there and if it's not removed quickly almost overnight it seems it becomes a huge hot spot right now we know that the state spends over 40 million on litter abatement dotd spends over eight million dollars alone picking up litter on the roadway and our state is still littered so think about what it would look like if we focused that amount of money on preventative measures instead of picking up litter yeah really a huge problem i guess we don't think about a lot stephanie you uh just recently wrote a big cover story in baton rouge business report actually highlighting one of the things we just saw in the video out at burden which is a beautiful place but i've never seen anything that looked like that on those properties tell me a little bit about what you learned from your reporting particularly here in baton rouge the scope of the problem what we covered in the story and what i really found out was that there are so many prongs or so many rabbit holes you can go down with this and you know as susan mentioned we don't have a comprehensive litter abatement strategy we don't have a culture in louisiana and certainly not here in baton rouge where litter has been a priority or you know even of something in the forefront of the public mind we don't have enforcement certainly in baton rouge and city leaders have said well it's very difficult to catch dumpers or litterers in the act and this is true but that can't be an excuse you know other places they do it people here don't recycle in great enough numbers and they don't bag their trash properly and that also creates or can add to the problem it's not the sole reason but it adds to the problem and then beyond that um the litter that does get into the watershed we don't have the adequate equipment to catch it there are something like 250 canal outfalls that dump into the watershed in baton rouge we only have boons or litter catching equipment at three of them and they're all pretty near lsu and you saw a picture of it on the video there and it's just like a big sieve it catches the litter and then you have to clean it out periodically that doesn't address the problem at the root but it at least keeps it from getting further downstream and that's something in baton rouge that we don't have and and beyond that we don't have a funding source to buy that kind of equipment even if there was the collective will to go ahead and purchase and install it and maintain it so i mean it's it's a messaging issue it's it's teaching people how to change their behavior and it's also a funding and resource issue somebody from state government or city government really needs to take the lead and say we need to have a plan we need to buy this equipment we need to fund the purchase of this equipment and the maintenance and it's not terribly expensive you know we're not talking about solving some insurmountable problem other places have showed us how to do it it's not cheap it's not free but it's doable and it's manageable and that was one thing that we found in the in the reporting but um but it has to be done and it hasn't been so far it's not the brum administration's fault this is a problem that goes way back like like jeff said in the video it's like 50 years worth of trash in that low-lying wetlands area at burden wow we just let this accumulate and just do not seem to have had the will to date to really address it dr benfield i want to turn to you real quickly because you have begun doing some research in an area of litter that's related to the pandemic in covid so i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that and what you've learned from that sure so prior to the pandemic if you walk down the street in anywhere in louisiana you would find water bottles and plastic bags and styrofoam clam shells and cups and things like that since the pandemic that's changed we've added a completely new class of what we call personal protective equipment or ppe waste and so we're talking about things like face masks rubber gloves sanitizing wipes hand sanitizer bottles the packaging for all those products and then as the pandemic has progressed we're starting to see things like nasal swabs i've found parts of a covid19 test kit so you know there's a myriad of of completely new non-degradable plastic products that are being put out there and we're finding a lot of trends that you know we are intuitive in terms of what we know about other sorts of litter for example the availability of the product seems to be related to its abundance on the streets at the beginning of the pandemic we didn't have masks available widely in the united states and so we didn't see masks on the street and then wipes just continue to increase uh you know data recent interview with the ceo of clorox said that in the last quarter of 2019 they produced one million canisters of clorox wipes this year just last week she said they're now up to 1.5 million canisters a day oh man that's a big change well since you have studied this problem globally what do you see in other countries in terms of trying to address it do we see any positive examples or models out there yeah we do i think all of the countries that we've looked at are in the same boat they're all struggling to deal with this amount of litter and and they're not really succeeding one interesting outlier and this goes back to what susan said is that litter begets more litter if you don't have trash cans if you don't have a ready place to dispose of this stuff then it's going to accumulate and people see it on the ground they're going to think well you know someone else did it so i can put it out there too the city of shenzhen which is a mega city in southern china one of our data sites is from a suburb called university town there it's about six campuses all together so i asked my colleague to do a survey there and she came back and said she didn't find any ppe waste and i asked her why and she said well outside every building on the campus and regularly located throughout the the grounds are dedicated ppe disposal bins and so people use them that's not to say there isn't other trash there but they certainly are using these disposal bins and so i think that's a model for us that every mega mall every box store every strip mall should have these disposal sites located right outside so that customers leaving the store have a ready place to dispose of this stuff yeah susan let me turn back to you i understand that keep louisiana beautiful offers classroom resources uh educational resources and i'm just wondering if you could tell our viewers how teachers might be able to access and what are the opportunities in the classroom sure we were just in baton rouge this saturday and we did an in-person teacher workshop and so we train the trainer in a sense to where we bring the teachers in and we do workshop on our program so that they can bring it into the classroom but we have 10 lesson plans for k through 5 and it aligns with the student standards we also have 20 activity sheets uh they're full of resources and and and hands-on activities for the kids and they're all free and can be downloaded on our website which is keep louisianabeautiful.org and we encourage the teachers to bring this into the classroom and teach it because education is such a critical part of this we need to break that cycle we need to get it to them at a young age and teach them how to be good community citizens and how to be environmental stewards and the kids love this they they really embrace it sometimes it's it's the adults that we have the hottest you know time with but um you know there's not one solution to this as we've all mentioned education is a piece enforcement is a piece there's also the role of the business community like to mark's point transition points are besides roadside that is the place where most people will litter so can we can we pass ordinances that require businesses to have trash and ash receptacles at the transition points when people enter the stores and are more likely to litter there's roles for parishes and municipalities we have a grants program we've awarded over three million dollars of grants through the years to nonprofits and municipalities and parishes to help them build capacity to fight these issues that we're talking about and one of our grants provides trash receptacles because we know that they're expensive and we also know that when a trash receptacle is there to mark's point there's a reduction of 52 percent of litter so they work and we've had some municipalities that won't even apply for the grant because they can't afford the labor to service them so that's when we talk about like the infrastructure and the funding it's not just about picking up the litter off the ground and we solve the problem this is very deep and it needs to be approached on multi-levels and we need everyone at the table and i know everybody doesn't want to hear this but it's true it takes money but to my point should we be spending money on the back end or would it be smarter for us to spend it on the front end good question and actually i wanted to turn to stephanie because one of the things that you discussed in your reporting was about our storm water management program and actually all the cities need to have those types of things but there are actually consequences big financial consequences we find ourselves out of compliance with some of these issues could you talk a little bit about that issue at least how it relates here in baton rouge well sure because you know as you mentioned we're required to have this plan on file with the epa it's administered through the state deq and going back at least 10 years baton rouge has been out of compliance on its stormwater management plan and so where we are now and i mean the two sides have gone back and forth they haven't found specific toxins in our water quality but there are just all sorts of gaping holes and lack of information in our plan about how we plan to deal with the waste and the litter as it gets into the watershed and epa and deq they keep coming back to the city you can follow the written correspondence and say what about this this and this months and years go by we still don't address it so where we are now is that epa is down here there are some sort of legal negotiations going on we could be staring at a federal consent decree which would mean if it's implemented that they would force solutions on us which would be probably a lot more costly n the long run than if we had addressed these problems on the front end now i mean they may be able to work out some sort of a some sort of a solution but it's just you know to susan's point it speaks to the problem that it's gotten this far that now the feds and the state are involved in telling us how to solve a problem that we should have solved ourselves on the front end many years ago well certainly a lot of food for thought there and right now i want to thank our panel susan russell stephanie regal and dr benfield for helping us get a better handle on the litter problems that we face here in louisiana tackling trash in louisiana is a three-pronged approach involving state agencies individual municipalities and residents we'll explore the role of local and state governments next after a brief overview when it comes to controlling litter in louisiana state police and the department of wildlife and fisheries are the key players in enforcement fines can climb to a hundred and seventy five dollars for simple littering like trash flying from a truck bed two hundred and fifty dollars for intentional littering from a vehicle and up to a thousand dollars for gross littering large amounts of trash tossed into ditches illegal dumping falls under the department of environmental quality and carries higher penalties i have the ability right now to charge 32 500 per day uh and i am getting to that point to where if if you are a willful violator a repeat offender then you could be subject to those types of fines deq secretary chuck brown explains the challenge the agency faces from used tire dealers well what they do is they bring in 2 000 tires in a truck they'll cull through and see 500 they can resale and if i don't if i'm not careful those 1500 will end up in somebody's field on the side of the road or in new orleans east preventing storm water pollution from making it into the state's watersheds is the responsibility of each municipality deq oversees these storm water management programs for the epa every city has so many miles or hundreds of miles of right-of-way that they maintain and they have to have a plan in place to be able to basically manage or prevent litter from getting into the lakes or the rivers or the receiving streams east baton rouge parish is currently in talks with the agency after failing its stormwater audit for a fourth time the next step could be a mandated consent decree joining us now to explore how cities and the state monitor litter is our next panel monique boulay is ceo of the acadiana planning commission her organization oversees the watershed management of 16 parishes sergeant garrett kimball has been working in the enforcement division of the department of wildlife and fisheries since 2005 nikita simon is an environmental compliance specialist with the department of transportation and development or dotd her duties include wastewater and storm water inspections and joining us remotely is constable rick moore a litter enforcement officer for saint tammany parish he organized their litter court which has served as a model statewide monique i wanted to start with you tell us a little bit about what your organization does and why it is so important in terms of litter and litter control sure so the acadiana planning commission is the administrator for the louisiana watershed region five i'm in the louisiana watershed initiative i'm sorry um is a is a statewide effort to really change our mentality and help our municipalities and our parishes and and and all of the associated organizations to really start thinking from a watershed initiative one of the things immediately after the flood of 2016 that really brings home the issue of litter in watershed management was one of the projects that we're still working on today to fix in abbeville the old the new bypass highway 14 went underwater and there are two bridges over the vermillion river the old bridge was the only way in and out and what was happening was littered debris was building up on one side of the bridge so you actually had water flow stop and as the houses and and structures were going underwater the town was begging dotd to lift the bridge well dotd could not lift the bridge because if there was an issue getting it back down you couldn't get emergency crews and response people in and so you don't realize when you drop a can at the mall and it ends up in the drain that it's going to potentially really create flooding you know we didn't we didn't expect that and the vermillion river is well managed and trash is picked up every day so you know even with that um effort going on we still have significant issues from liver from from litter absolutely sergeant kimball let me turn to you on that we had seen earlier in the program some of the examples of litter when it gets into you know some of our wetland areas and areas like that with wildlife and fisheries i i would imagine you see a lot of that and if you could tell us a little bit about that problem from from your perspective at wildlife and fisheries sure yeah litter has such a negative impact on the on the wildlife and fish habitat in louisiana and you know we've had issues where used fishing line has been tangled up around animals and fish and and that causes issues obviously with their health there have been animals found with dead animals found with with plastics and cigarette butts and stuff like that stuck in their stomachs and so it's an obvious health issue for the game and the fish as well as uh you know making their habitat um dirty and and and have bacteria and those those animals and those fish they they need clean habitat kitty let me go to you right now from dotd's perspective what is dotd's role in terms of storm water management and how does that impact the litter situation in louisiana sure so dltd is considered an ms4 and that stands for municipal separate storm water sewer system and we are we have we operate under an ms4 permit issued by the louisiana department of environmental quality under this permit we are required to implement a statewide storm water management program and also under the permit we are also required to incorporate six minimum control measures into the permit to address our discharges from our drainage systems our construction sites and our facilities and so to incorporate best management practices for each of those and that basically means we have standard goals and practices to achieve those goals one minimum control measure is public outreach and education so in our efforts to educate the public we have brochures at our rest areas and welcome centers that address storm water pollution one is called after the storm another is called understanding storm water both of these brochures give a general overview of what storm storm water pollution is it sources the problems it creates and how to prevent the polluted runoff in addition to these brochures we also have children activity packets that um that help children understand how they can be a solution to water pollution and to help their family and friends recognize what litter is and how it contributes to water pollution and how to be not the problem but part of the solution well that's great i wanted to turn now to constable moore because i was fascinated to learn that you helped establish a litter court for saint tammany parish way back in 2001. i was wondering if you could explain a little bit about how a litter court works and kind of the role you play in the litter court uh yes sir bro well thank you for allowing me to be on your program today my name is rick moore i am a constable saint centric parish for the last 20 years very few people know that and know the jurisdiction of a jp and a constable but a few of us got together about 20 years ago and went to the state of louisiana and particularly the attorney general's office and sat down with them to develop some type of structure to establish litter court it was passed by the legislature back in 2001 and after that point we went into our local government saint tammany parish government and worked with them to develop ordinances in order to control litter in our parish and what we basically did was just mirror the state law at that time and and moved it into our parish ordinance uh the state statute that you can refer to to uh review this is rs 13-25-86 and it's a state law anybody can use it uh city cities municipalities and as well as parishes now look this was slow going this wasn't a fast process by any means uh it was it was tedious uh no one was there to teach us how to do this court we learned as we went along and as we grew and we developed this into a model of letter chord as it is today we were proud uh to be able to prosecute the offenders because at that time litter was everywhere in saint tammany parish and we just wanted a tool to to control letter and to remove illegal signs off of telephone poles and in the ditches and so forth uh we treated our court fairly and had due process all through the process and and i want to also let you know that uh little chord is is uh established with one just of the piece and two consoles so basically an entire parish can have a little one one judge and then and the two constables one of max as a witness to the event the offender and the second council acts as a prosecutor and that's stated in state law that that could be set up that way we heard earlier in the program about a success story with the managed management of bayou vermillion uh could you tell us a little bit more about that how that is funded and kind of how that operates sure we have a millage um it's actually the one of the only regional uh funded villages where four parishes put in and it it's a it's a local millage now i will say with the watershed initiative we're looking statewide at really funding a different way to manage our waterways and over the next 12 to 18 months and we've already started the outreach process we will be meeting with all of our local governments and and the key stakeholders in each of the areas to really ask that question you know we have serious problems with drainage and that and litter is included in that and so how do we address that we we have to look at probably um several different funding mechanisms i don't think there's a one answer far far the the enormity of the problem that we have with our watershed management and again litter is part of that so right now the bay vermillion district and the tesh freshwater district is funded by a local millage that is one of the funding mechanisms that we're going to be looking at do you see that kind of as a model maybe for other areas to follow suit on that type of approach i think it can be those millages are very specific right now and so they're limited to to the function of that millage and that's what happens with millages and really we have to look at our watersheds all the way from the litter that goes into them to how we build in and around them and so it's a big question there's that there's uh i know i know the state has put together a white paper on all of the different funding mechanisms and and again i don't think anybody feels like there's a there's a one solution answer to this i think it's gonna it's gonna have to be multiple funding mechanisms and really a mindset shift we really have to think differently about our waterways i think many generations at least several generations ago our waterways were a real asset and we built on high ground and we thought about them differently and we treated them differently and somehow along the way they've just become part of our landscape and and not really as as important in our culture i think as they were at one time so changing our mind shift and understanding the impacts on our waterways on the water quality um the the the content in the water all that we have to really think different about that and so so funding it i don't think is again i don't think there's a one answer i think and and meeting with the different jurisdictions when you say millage everybody throws their hands up no it's kind of like you know saying cancer before you say something much more minor um so maybe a millage is only a piece of it but you know maybe there's there are fees there uh usage fees maybe um we're looking at at a multiple and we really are getting feedback we really are going very local to the people who are making the decisions and and and actually the people who are maintaining our waterways the public works directors in vil platt and and then you know all the way down and say mary parish you know their work is interconnected and so we're meeting with all of them and really getting that feedback um and hoping to come up with some really good funding solutions that people can live with well one thing we're learning very much out of this is it's a very complicated problem um sergeant kimball we heard a little bit earlier um in the in the piece about the penalties that we have in louisiana for littering and we heard from deq about the large number of amounts of fines that they can uh uh assess for littering what do you think is is part of the issue there do we have enough in terms of tools in terms of fines assessments that type of thing is that the problem or is it more like maybe what monique is talking about it's a mindset change that we need more of right i think you know in louisiana the the penalties for littering range from 175 dollar fine to roughly a thousand dollars in fines um as well as the possibility of um having to do some type of community service such as litter pickup um louisiana law categorizes um littering acts in three three different types simple littering intentional littering and then gross littering simple entering would be driving down the road having something in the back of your vehicle flying out the back of your vehicle intentional littering would be such as driving down the road and intentionally throw in something like a drink container or fast food wrapper or something like that out the window of your vehicle or out of the boat out of your boat into the water gross littering would be dumping large amounts of trash household garbage bags of household garbage tires furniture stuff like that i certainly think that that increased penalties or or harsher penalties for the intentional and the gross littering would be more of a deterrent effect for uh for littering acts nikita let me ask you about something i've heard about the dodd adopt a road program sounds like a really good idea sounds like maybe it's something that also could address the problem and maybe save money as well could could you tell us a little bit about that absolutely so the adopt the road program is a dotd sponsor program that enlists volunteers to um to remove littering debris from our federal and state roadsides it does save taxpayers money because it's completely voluntary the program also provides recognition to the volunteer groups and organizations that participate in the program it promotes um a civic responsibility and pride in your community it makes the public aware of that and it helps to keep louisiana just clean and green so if there are any groups volunteer groups or organizations that see an area in their community that they think needs to be cleaned what they would need to do is contact their local dot district office to verify that that area is available to be adopted in the dot the road program and submit application and that's basically it there's a little more information on our website which is www.dotd.la.gov well i hope people will take you up on that and take a look at that constable moore i wanted to come back to you um one question i had was um if i see somebody littering and i'm in a parish like yours that has a litter court what does a citizen do in terms of reporting or how does that mechanism work well we have numerous ways of supporting a litter in our parish uh we have website we have signs that are all over the parish we have you use your phone book the sheriff's office uh the the the parish gut city or governments the facebook as well but we have numerous ways to do it uh our most popular way is that it's on a website people can go to a government website it has a drop down box to report letter you'd also go to ke p saying tammy beautiful website they also have a uh area where you can report letter and what we're proud of that we came across is what's called an affidavit it's called the litter affidavit which engages the public into helping us uh fight and litter because without the public without their eyes and ears out there it becomes impossible to fight litter but they go online to fill out the affidavit uh it comes back to our office we then we start investigating it it could be a license plate number it could be a credit card it could be a a bag on the side the road virtually anything and we have the subpoena powers being adjusted to pieces have the subpoena power as a search and get phone numbers for instance to locate these offenders because we have numerous dump sites around our parish like i'm sure all the parishes do but uh they could also we also have a mechanism in place uh throughout the different wards because the jp constables are their jurisdictions are called wards and what the parish has done is we put up signs within their areas with their name phone number addresses on it so the general public can can call those numbers they can report letter and that gets reported to the constables and then we go out and investigate and try to clean up our parish it's taken a long time to get to this point and we're just proud of what we've accomplished well that's great sergeant kimball just to follow up on that same question from your perspective with wildlife and fisheries if somebody sees a violation should they go to you to wildlife and fisheries the police what's the the best angle for people to take there right yeah we we always urge citizens to get involved i mean we have such a beautiful scenic landscape in louisiana and we should all be proud of that and we should all take action to try to help protect that and so we always urge citizens to call the litter hotline which is uh 1-888-litterbug l-i-t-r-b-u-g or you can always reach out to your local wildlife agent if you have contact with them reach out to them and and give them the specifics on you know if you saw someone littering and you can also reach out to your regional wildlife and fisheries office well thanks so much and that's all the time we have for in this segment thanks very much to ms boulay sergeant kimball ms simon and constable moore for their input we know that over 80 percent of litter is intentional so how can people's bad behaviors be changed we'll hear next from some folks who are helping set some good examples but first an lsu researcher shares some troubling data about recycling and a shreveport organization illustrates four proven ways to help people do the right thing how do you stop people from littering studies show it's hard to change ingrained habits dr margaret reams is a professor of environmental science at lsu in the 90s she studied the amount of litter in several baton rouge neighborhoods that didn't recycle versus one that had for many years in that older pilot community and also in the communities with no curbside recycling yet uh we saw you know higher levels of all kinds of of littering so uh it was again just the beginning of some insight that the participation of recycling for the first time uh maybe generated sort of a warm glow and a feeling of altruism uh in pro-environmental you know behavior but there was not really evidence that it would carry over to really just a reduction in litter in general for donna curtis director of shreveport green it's all about enforcement after 25 years at the helm she's been able to get the city to open an environmental court we'll have um attorneys or judges that sit and listen to these code enforcement and litter violations and then that's all they listen to and they are going to hold them a little more accountable her organization does regular cleanups relying on a bench of volunteers 13 000 deep the group recently distributed containers around the city to collect cigarette butts and targets litter that flies from truck beds twice a year we've been able to do tarp giveaways with the bungee cords and everything that they can come pick up a tarp if they sign a pledge saying they're going to use this tarp to keep control things in the back of their trucks measures like these make it easier for people not to litter one of four proven ways to change behaviors an increase in pro-environmental values in the community can also exert positive peer pressure we have a clean business program where we work with the businesses to clean up their areas they have a check sheet that they can go through and figure out ways that maybe they can stop litter from inside the offices to the outside to even their vehicles educational programs provided through groups like keep louisiana beautiful help students understand the harmful effects of litter the final way to change behavior is to create confidence that what a person does makes a meaningful difference something shreveport green has hard data on we discovered that after our first year of in being in business and working on this that we had a reduction of 85 percent litter curtis says litter indicates people don't care an attitude she hopes we all can change the image of litter in a community is very detrimental it hurts tourism it ruins property values the results of litter are all over the place providing ways for citizens to get involved in louisiana's war on litter is the topic of our third panel marie constantine is an award-winning photographer best known for her iconic images of mother teresa she's currently on a mission to have halt the litter flow to the capitol lake across from the governor's mansion steffik rainey is a member of louisiana's legislative youth advisory council he serves on the environmental committee and is a contender for the epa's presidential youth award and joining us remotely from thibodaux is alma robichaux she's a member of the louisiana recycling coalition and has worked in marine education and research for 25 years so welcome to all of you marie let's start with you and i've seen the videos of this and it's just amazing to me but you and volunteers have collected enough bags of litter from capitol lake right by the governor's mansion to fill a football field what inspired you to take on this project and what have you learned about how litter gets there and then how we can eliminate it yeah we're um we're up to 710 bags now wow so that football field's getting real full but what inspired me i went down beginning of last year and down to the lake to walk my dog and i saw litter is the density that i've never seen in my life it was just shocking it made me so sad and the truth is i thought of mother teresa's words you know i'm not called to be successful i'm called to be faithful and i said well this applies here because there's no way anybody can clean this up so i thought i'm going to give a year of my life i'm just going to come down pick up litter not worry and i'm going to post on facebook so i started posting on facebook and then i think people felt sorry for me and so they started saying can i come help and before you know it we cleaned up the whole lake literally except for the northern wooded part and so then um to our horror to our absolute we discovered that we cleaned it and celebrated and we discovered 41 bags a month were flowing in from the city's untreated storm drains because we have 250 storm canals and three bombs in the entire city and um capital lakes really the city was the litter bug and so that's how this all got started well it's amazing we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment but stephanie let me turn to you uh tell us a little bit about the legislative youth advisory council and particularly your role in the environmental committee of lyack right so the legislative youth advisory council is a group of 31 students from around the state of louisiana we're chosen by the commission on civic education and we meet to try to advocate for issues currently affecting the youth in our state and to meet with legislators and local leaders to present our ideas to them every year we try to pass some actual policy and legislation and on the environmental committee which i serve on we look at issues affecting the youth regarding uh the natural environment and this year litter and reducing pollution is one of our main focuses and we're really looking at different um avenues that we can take with different uh policies and initiatives that we can implement to try to reduce litter and pollution well that's great that's very encouraging to get you're helping to get young people involved in that alma robicheaux wanted to turn to you really quickly how well do you think louisiana is doing as far as recycling goes and what are some of the challenges we face there well uh we're not doing well at all we are currently last in the nation for recycling in fact we have about a six percent recycling rate in louisiana so it's very discouraging and the problem is is that we're a very rural state which means that most municipalities do not have options for recycling we only have one residential recycling facility in the state and it is currently in baton rouge and so if you are a municipality that is further away it you have transportation costs you have collection costs and then disposal costs and because there's only one facility uh pricing options are limited and then on the other hand landfills are plentiful in our state and because of that the tipping rates on the landfills are relatively low so when a municipality is deciding on how to dispose of its residential waste it's cheaper and easier to go right to the landfill instead of to the recycling plant marie let me turn back to you uh talking about you know follow-up really on that issue right there how does for instance in the area of capital lake how does all that litter all of that plastic really get into you know the areas like that and what are some of the solutions because i know you've looked at some of those that would actually help us get rid of that stuff permanently well first of all i don't think that 80 percent of litter is intentional i think it's intentional and some percentage is the way we handle waste and i don't i think litter is so complicated we can't really say that but whatever it is something we're doing is not wrong is not right we we need to pivot and change our thinking and look at what other states have done and we know that other states are successful so in the terms of capital lake we're going to go from 41 bags flowing in when we get uh several booms in the northdale canal supplied by braf in the state we're going to go from 41 to between two and six we're going to have a plus 80 percent success rate in capital lakes just because of these bombs and now i know lafayette is working with the vermillion it's been tremendously successful there and they've grown ecotourism because of it but we've found out even more stuff that's fascinating we studied florida and took a trip to pensacola we learned that 30 years ago we learned from vendors that were 30 years behind in capturing storm water litter in the storm water we learned from florida that they went to the legislature and they passed a law saying declaring stormwater to be a utility that could be put on a utility bill and so when they did that they basically created a funding source for any community that wanted to be able to fund a program to pick up litter in a storm water but then there was an amazing unintended thing that happened that that was completely unexpected when they had the program and the money and the millions to clean up litter they found that they weren't flooding because that same money was used for educating that we don't have right now it was used for keeping the canals clean that we don't have right now it was used for new canals money for new canals that we don't have right now intercepting litter this is amazing and if you think about this litter the litter of our grandfathers was not toxic ours is we should be calling this something that goes on a utility bill and florida saw that 30 years ago and it was because of the clean water act they took that act and they actually strengthened florida laws and in strength and then they provided the funding vehicle to the towns in 160 towns in florida and and so we say well don't do it on the back end absolutely we should do it on the back end because the streets are the lipstick and the pearls and the wetland and the watershed is the soul and the soul is where we have fun and we go fishing and we go hiking and we wrestle with alligators and we do all kind of crazy things and have our culture of course we should clean it up on the back end and when we clean it up on the back end it just all goes out and all of a sudden these people are there having all these this fun start protecting it and that's what florida did and that's what vermillion did and that's what we have got to do but vermillion could lose their funding because it's on a whatever you call it the tax thing we cannot let us lose the funding to clean this up it's got to be on a utility bill well that's encouraging to hear that there are solutions and examples of success stories out there stephanie let me ask you what do you think when you hear marie's story and i guess to follow up on that how do you get youth involved people your age involved in something like this when there are so many other things students in high school have on their plate right now yeah so the youth we are the future environmental leaders so our actions today will have a large consequence in the future and so the best thing that the youth can do is to get involved and to advocate you know let people know that this is an issue that you care about and that this is an issue that is affecting your community talk with your parents your teachers your school administrators even your peers and get your peers involved engage them in this this topic you know you can organize litter cleanups in your community you can host an event to raise environmental awareness and you can also lead by example by showing other people um ways that that they can reduce their own waste and thus reduce litter and pollution one of the biggest easiest ways that that the youth can do this is by choosing to reuse rethinking your your choices using less single-use items you know bringing your own reusable water bottle to school bringing your lunch and your snacks in reusable containers with reusable cutlery and just talking with your friends about this uh letting them know that it exists because you know the change isn't going to happen overnight but it has to start somewhere and we have the ability to start making this change now so that hopefully we can have a better situation in the future well i must say i think a lot of the young people i've been around certainly have a greater awareness of some of those things single-use items and those types of things than a lot of people in my generation so that's great that that you're promoting that um let me turn to you again i understand that china did something back in 2018 that actually made it cheaper for americans to dispose of plastics in the landfills rather than recycle it which is what we want um what was going on there well china banned foreign um solid waste so we could no longer send our recyclables over to china and sixty percent of our recyclables were going over there so when they banned it we uh were we were stuck with it we had to figure out what we were going to do with it the reason chyna banned it and the problem with it was that it was contaminated so it did it was not fully just one and two plastics or it wasn't all cardboard it had stuff mixed into it that contaminated we're kind of wishful recyclers so we'd like to throw everything in and there was a time in the united states there was a time in louisiana that curbside recycling was separated so you would put your plastics in one you put your glass you put your paper your cardboard your aluminum cans and the hauler would take it uh separated to the recycling facilities and so you had pretty clean stock going to the recycling mater cycling factories and so they like that it's easy for them to take a whole thing of milk jugs and make it into a new milk jug but if there's something in there that's not a milk jug say a tide container or a clam shell that will disturb the process of the factory and it will lower the value of the recyclable um that they're producing also the cost of recycling um has shot up i mean because we are trying to sort everything there's a substantial substantial cost to try to sort it all out people put whatever they want in there and aluminum cans values have gone down it's 39 cents a pound i think and it takes about 30 to 33 cans to make a pound so you're looking at about one cent per can so it's just not as reasonable for people to recycle as it used to be they're not making on the back end and of course nothing is recycled until it is made into a new product and so we are encouraging people to buy recyclable products we are trying to get industries into louisiana that use recyclable products and use recycle use recycling base to make new products and so they will buy stuff from our murph from our recycling facility and then make it into new products so the louisiana recycling coalition is trying to connect those dots between the haulers the manufacturers the end users and then trying to get people in louisiana to really buy recycled products and get the market up you kind of alluded to the the notion of wish cycling or wish recycling you know i think as a consumer many of us just want to know what is it we can do to actually recycle better could you help us so that we're not wish cycling or re-wish recycling and actually doing something that would be helpful in recycling yes definitely when in doubt throw it out if it's not something that you know for sure is going to be recycling if you recycled if you have any question just throw it into the garbage can it would be better to go to the landfill than it would be to go to the recycling facility and get caught up in the machines plastic bags get caught up in the machines all the time people recycle hoses you know i have these glasses right here they're made of plastic so oh yeah plastic's recyclable i can throw it in there but at our recycling facility it is not recyclable and also with cell phones or um electronics they are recyclable but not in the curbside recycling bin or in drop-off uh recycling bins you have to take those to specific places to be recycled so it's all about education and i encourage everyone to keep checking back with their uh parishes with their municipalities and find out exactly what is recyclable and what is not and and make sure that you just put in the clean stuff and if you're not sure it's better to go into the garbage can well thanks so much for that and this has certainly been an insightful hour on this topic of litter we have run out of time for our discussion tonight but we do want to thank marie constantine mr rainey miss robichaux and all of our participants for their input we encourage you to comment on tonight's show by visiting lpb.org public square and clicking on the join the conversation link and we'd love to hear from you and get your comments again thanks for watching and have a great evening [Music] [Applause] [Music] for a copy of this program call 1-800-973-7246 or go online to www.lpb.org