It’s been about six weeks since city workers installed a litter basket on the lamp post near my front door. I wanted it, and I’ve been taking care of it. Would a litter basket make the nearby sidewalk and street cleaner?
The answer is yes. Dramatically so.
I haven’t had to pick up a little blue dog poop bag since we put out the litter basket. I’ve had to pick up small pieces of paper only a couple of times.
We lined the litter basket with a black plastic bag. For the first week or so, people didn’t know the basket was available. But as they discovered it, they began to use it regularly, and now we must replace the bag every trash day. On Art Walk day, we had to replace the bag twice even though a neighbor had put out a big trash barrel at the corner. Where would the cups and flyers and candy wrappers have gone if we hadn’t had our litter basket?
We went away for five days over the Memorial Day weekend, and I wondered what would happen. I learned that without my asking him, a neighbor had pulled out the old trash bag and replaced it with one of his own.
Thank you, Greg.
One problem to solve was to determine the best bag to use. The city workers had left about five contractor-grade bags at the bottom of the litter basket after they installed it. They were heavy enough to stay open on their own. We used them up, but I wasn’t keen on paying extra for thick plastic bags. The solution has been cheaper, thinner bags, secured with a rubber band the hardware store sells for purposes such as these. We reuse the rubber band.
We’ve faced only a few other problems. While no one has stashed obvious household trash in the basket, someone did try to pound a thin white trash bag filled with a pizza box and leavings into the litter basket. It didn’t fit well.
But the pizza was high off the ground. Had the perpetrators left it on the sidewalk, rats would have surely torn open the bag and spread the dough and sauce around—leaving me get on my gloves, pick it up, and then hose the whole thing down.
The litter basket has made a difference in front of my house, but it seems to be effective for only about 40 feet in either direction. It’s hard to understand why a person with trash wouldn’t walk another 40 feet to put it in an appropriate place.
Maybe they still don’t realize there is a litter basket nearby. More likely, they are slobs.
As always when this column considers trash, I got many responses. One reader recalled the litter baskets that used to hang on poles in the North End. Others said they were happy that I had a litter basket, but they wouldn’t want one in front of their house. I can see how someone might not want a litter basket taking up visual space at their door. But the alternative is litter itself in front of the door.
I’ve chosen the basket over the litter. And a few readers said they would volunteer to take care of a litter basket. If you live on Beacon Hill, call the Beacon Hill Civic Association at 617-227-1922 to get your name on a list of volunteers, suggested Rajan Nanda, the chair of the association’s city services committee. His committee will then work with the city.
If you live in another neighborhood, call your neighborhood association and ask them to work with the civic association to get more of these baskets out on the street where volunteers will care for them.
The city doesn’t want to hire workers to empty the baskets. But they might be persuaded to buy the baskets if enough volunteers were out there. It takes us less than a minute to change the bags every trash day. And I’ve got a litter-free sidewalk and gutter for the first time since I’ve lived in Boston.