News
Roadside trash costs Mississippi taxpayers $3 million a year
“Don’t Trash Mississippi.”
That’s the message the Mississippi Department of Transportation wants to get across to drivers using the roads across the state.
Roadside trash—litter—is a $3 million problem in Mississippi, MDOT says, and it’s diverting manpower and funds away from maintaining roads and bridges.
“Every hour (our workers) are picking up trash it’s costing the taxpayer in lost man hours,” Jace Ponder, MDOT public information officer told the Hattiesburg American “I would rather have the maintenance workers patching the road than picking up litter.”
Here are some of the facts and figures from the MDOT website:
- Across the U.S., about half of all litter is of deliberate origin, consisting mainly of convenience packaging and products. The other half of litter is of accidental origin, resulting from uncovered trucks, unsecured loads, loss of vehicle parts, trashcan spills, and simple human carelessness.
- Mississippi’s rate of deliberate litter is much higher than the national average: 62 percent, with more than a quarter of that consisting of take-out food packaging, including cups and napkins.
- Litter rates along Mississippi’s rural roads is 30 percent higher than the average of other states.
- Seventy-one percent of Mississippi’s litter is actually viewed by the public on interstates and rural highways.
- Seventy-five percent of persons deliberately littering along interstates and rural roadways are between the ages of 11 and 34 years and are mostly male.
“Mississippi can no longer afford to ignore a problem that costs over $3 million a year in clean-up efforts and immeasurable dollars in lost tourism and economic development,” MDOT says on its website, adding that it’s “on a mission to keep litter off Mississippi roadways.”
One of the tools in the MDOT arsenal is its Inmate Litter Removal Program, where MDOT partners with local law enforcement departments at the county and municipal level to use prisoners to remove litter from state maintained highways.
In Fiscal Year 2018, MDOT personnel worked 30,467 man hours to pick up 3,400 cubic yards of litter, while 6,396 MDOT man hours were spent supervising the inmate litter program, which collected another 4,079 cubic yards of trash, according to the Hattiesburg American.
Among the agency’s programs that help fund litter removal are Adopt-a-Highway and Adopt-an-Interchange. MDOT also has Myrtle the Turtle, part of a program for elementary schools to educate children on the importance to keeping Mississippi clean and beautiful for all.
For more information, visit MDOT’s Think Green pages on its website.
See a typo? Report it here.