Troup County is not unlike other counties in Georgia. Litter is a statewide concern. The Georgia Department of Transportation annually spends about $17 million to remove roadside trash from state highways while municipal and county governments, like ours, spend thousands more to keep litter off locally maintained roads. The Georgia DOT concludes that litter negatively impacts our wellbeing on four fronts:
— Economics – Cleaner counties are more likely to attract new businesses than those with litter. Tourism decreases when visitors see roadsides littered with trash.
— Environment – Litter adversely affects wildlife and water quality.
— Public safety – Litter on and along roads can be both unsightly and dangerous.
— Quality of life – Litter affects, and reflects, how we feel about our community.
Litter diminishes our county’s beauty, decreases property values and negatively impacts economic development and tourism by creating the impression that we don’t care about where we live.
Keep America Beautiful, with which Keep Troup Beautiful is affiliated, has determined littering to be a quality of life crime that can lead to serious criminal and economic problems. The national organization cites the Broken Windows Theory of sociologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, who hypothesized in Atlantic Monthly (March 1982) that general disorder in communities contributes to the rise of serious crime.
If a window is broken and not repaired quickly, the professors theorized, the perception that no one cares about the building spreads and soon more windows are broken. When many windows have been broken, people sense that no one cares about the street and soon other structures are vandalized. Residents who fear for their safety abandon their neighborhoods. Homes are sold, businesses fail, and crime rises.
Followup studies by Kelling confirmed the Broken Windows Theory by revealing a strong link between quality of life crimes, like vandalism and graffiti, and the rise of serious crime.
In Troup County, litter is our broken window.
As beautiful as spring is here, with trees budding and dogwoods blooming, the blight of roadside trash detracts from our community’s natural wonders. As hard as our citizens work to solve the problems that ail us, the daily view of roadside litter creates the impression that no one cares.
Fortunately, this is a problem with a solution. Just as a broken window can be repaired, litter can be eliminated.
In Troup County, we hope to do more than control litter. We hope to prevent it. To do that, we simply must stop littering. For this to happen, actions – and the mindsets that prompt them – must change.
In a three-year study, Keep America Beautiful learned that people who litter do so because they feel no sense of ownership for the property, they believe someone else will clean up after them, or they feel it’s acceptable to litter where trash already has accumulated.
We must decide that it is never acceptable to litter. Teach our children not to litter. Set an example. Pick up trash in front of our homes. Keep a trash bag in our cars. Secure trash in the back of our pickups. Adopt an area and pledge to keep it clean.
Keep America Beautiful has found that the most successful way to prevent littering in a community is to have an ongoing program that involves local governments, businesses, civic groups, the media, schools and private citizens.
Troup County commissioners join our county’s municipalities and local businesses and groups this weekend to support the Great American Cleanup. But we recognize that one day of unified effort won’t solve the litter problem.
Our efforts, as Keep America Beautiful observes, must be ongoing.
— For more information on the Great American Cleanup, call Keep Troup Beautiful at (706) 884-9922, fax at (706) 883-8215 or email djefferson@asginfo.net. Download registration forms at www. keeptroupbeautiful.com or pick them up at KTB offices at 251 S.L. White Blvd. off Callaway Church Road; the Troup County Commission office or planning department in the Government Center; LaGrange Daily News at 105 Ashton St.; or Mimi’s Apparel in Hogansville.
We generally don't, here in Alabama, and the problem is worse.