Talkin' Trash

The American landscape changed immensely with the development of transportation and travel. By the mid-twentieth century, America the Beautiful had become America the unbeautiful. For years, people had tossed out their rubbish haphazardly, littering the countryside with trash.

It meant nothing to chunk fast food cups, wrappers, even whole bags of garbage out the car window as you roared down the highway. Tossing trash even became a source of entertainment and competition. The game consisted of trying to hit a road sign with some discard as you sped past it. If you hit it, points were collected. The one with the most points was the winner.

In 1953, a group of civic-minded individuals, businesses, and non-profits came together to form Keep America Beautiful – a joint venture between the public and private sectors to clean up America once again. Anti-littering signs and billboards sprung up around the country and dotted the landscape with the slogans “Keep America Beautiful” and “Don’t Be a Litter Bug.”

The First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, joined in to promote a highway beautification program; and TV’s beloved Lassie became the mascot for one of their anti-littering campaigns.

The Ad Council began to utilize television to show Public Service Announcements (PSA), with one of the first being Suzy Spotless telling her dad, and America, that “Every Litter Bit Hurts.” By far, though, the Crying Indian PSA, launched on the first Earth Day in 1971, had the greatest impact and became one of the most successful PSA campaigns to date. It’s tagline: “People Start Pollution. People Can Stop It.”

Americans got the message and littering decreased significantly, but not completely. Texas launched a statewide campaign in 1986 with the famous slogan, “Don’t Mess With Texas.” Ten years later, in 1996, three young siblings in Boca Raton, Florida started a cigarette butt beach clean-up campaign that spread internationally; their slogan - “No Butts About It.”

All in all, littering has diminished. In fact, it is down 61 percent since 1969. But, 39 percent of all trash is still being tossed out. To reduce that stat further, Keep America Beautiful has launched another anti-littering campaign. This campaign, geared toward young adults, ages 18 - 34 (the age group research data found most likely to litter), utilizes social media outlets to get people thinking about the wrongness of littering.

An interactive campaign, “Littering is Wrong Too,” asks people to respond by posting what they compare the wrongness of littering to. Examples of some posts are “Not replacing an empty toilet paper roll is wrong,” and “Giving a Speedo as a retirement gift is wrong.” All posts are followed by the slogan Littering is Wrong Too. You can post and read more at http://www.litteringiswrongtoo.org/.

Keep Smyrna Beautiful will be out promoting this campaign at Smyrna’s Birthday celebration event on Saturday, Aug 6. KSB board member Keith Bentley is heading up KSB’s Littering is Wrong Too project. He and other volunteers will be at the City’s birthday celebration with t-shirts and information about the anti-littering campaign. They will also be giving you the opportunity to write what you feel is as wrong as littering. So come on out, celebrate Smyrna’s birthday, toss out your thoughts…but keep your trash to yourself.