Volunteers with a truck bed full of trash and tires collected on Green Up Day 2024.
Every year on the first Saturday of May, Vermonters come together to clean up their town roads, collecting everything from beer cans to old tires in plastic bags provided free of charge by local organizers. At the end of the day, these bags are returned to a town collection point at no cost. Living in Vermont, it’s easy to forget that Green Up Day is a tradition unique to our state. We are fortunate to have a dedicated day to care for our natural landscapes and waterways. As the first Saturday in May (May 3rd) approaches, now is the perfect time to start planning for Green Up Day, and to remember how we got to the point where it became necessary to hold Green Up Day at all.
This year marks the 55th Annual Vermont Green Up Day. The first Green Up Day was April 18, 1970– four days before the first Earth Day. Burlington Free Press reporter Robert Babcock came up with the idea and approached Governor Deane Davis, who then launched the event the next year. That first Green Up Day, Vermont closed the Interstate Highways from 9 AM to noon for litter pickup by volunteers. Schools bused in children to take part. 90% of litter picked up on that first event was composed of beer bottles, which led to the passage of Vermont’s first “Bottle Bill,” under which anyone can return a covered bottle or can to a retailer or redemption center to redeem the deposit.
In 2024 over 30,000 volunteers participated in Green Up Day, which is roughly 4.65% of the entire population of Vermont. Those volunteers collected over 404 tons (808,000 pounds) of trash and nearly 16,000 tires from Vermont’s roads. That year Green Up Vermont broke the Guinness World Record for most pledges for trash cleanup received in 24 hours– 6,833 pledges. Given these numbers, it is worth asking–what did Vermont do with our waste between the time of European colonization up until Green Up Day was created?
If you walk the woods of Vermont, you are likely to stumble upon old dump sites composed of rusted metal containers and brown glass beer bottles. If you live in an old farmhouse and have had to do any excavation, you may have discovered ancient trash yourself. This is because, up until 1968, municipalities were not required to provide access to landfills or incinerators. Before this law was enacted, the accepted method of solid waste disposal was typically open burning; Vermont had roughly 200 dumps that open burned on a regular basis. Many old farmhouses had a designated area where they simply dumped solid waste. The state didn’t begin adopting solid waste management regulations in 1977.
This timing coincided with the rise in use of plastics. By the 1960s and 70s plastic, particularly single use plastic, had become incredibly popular. Plastic replaced glass shampoo and soda bottles, paper grocery bags, wood in furniture, and steel in cars. Industries quickly caught on to the ways that plastic could help them cut costs and make more money. Soft drink companies switched to plastic, which prevented them from having to coordinate bottle return programs that were costly to run. Consumers actually had to be taught through paid, targeted advertising how to throw out these new plastic, single-use bottles. This paid advertising worked, so much so that consumers also began throwing out glass bottles that they had once viewed as reusable.
Packaging companies like Coca Cola and Dixie Cup Company countered this new problem with the Keep America Beautiful campaign. This campaign was responsible for the famous “Crying Indian” PSA, which featured a white actor playing a Native American man canoeing down a river. He disembarks beside a road, where someone driving by tosses litter at his feet. One single tear runs down his face. You can still watch this ad today on Youtube. The key message of this campaign was that we as individuals are responsible for litter, and that it was an individuals’ personal responsibility to “clean up” the environment. Keep America Beautiful cleverly avoided laying any responsibility on the companies choosing to use plastic, creating waste in the first place. Modern day partners of Keep America Beautiful include multinational chemical companies like Dupont and Dow, food and beverage companies like Pepsico and Coca-Cola, MacDonalds, Marlboro, and many others.
Green Up Day is a great exercise in taking meaningful action to improve the environment around you, and it’s a wonderful example of stewardship and responsibility to teach youth. That said, it is worth remembering how we got to a point where our roads are littered with trash–much of it plastic–and the way that corporations benefit from the current status quo. For my part, I’ll be participating in Green Up Day this year, and hope you will join in wherever you are. Visit this link to get involved, where you can find details specific to your town and download the Green Up App. Remember to wear bright colors, gloves, check for ticks, and walk facing the direction of traffic.
