AASHTO Journal - ‘No Trash November’ Clears 70,000 Pounds of Litter

The fourth annual “No Trash November” cleanup event spearheaded by the Tennessee Department of Transportation removed nearly 70,000 pounds of litter from state roadways and waterways in 2024.

[Above image by Tennessee DOT]

Part of the agency’s Nobody Trashes Tennessee campaign, the yearly “No Trash November” effort brings together Keep Tennessee Beautiful affiliates, Tennessee DOT grantees, Adopt-A-Highway groups, youth groups, water groups, and individuals who all work together to clean up trash as part of that state initiative.

All told, 2,412 volunteers participated in 175 “No Trash November” cleanups in 2024, collecting 3,207 bags of litter, weighing 69,776 pounds.

The agency noted that litter on public roads and waterways has detrimental impacts on safety, the environment, and the economy. At any given time, there are 88 million pieces of litter on the state’s roadways and Tennessee DOT spends more than $23 million annually on litter pickup and prevention education; efforts funded through dedicated revenue from Tennessee’s Soft Drink and Malt Beverage industries.

“[These] community cleanups and individual actions taken [in November 2024] showcase what we can achieve when we work together to preserve our state’s beauty,” Michael McClanahan with Tennessee DOT’s Beautification Office noted in a statement.

“We encourage all residents to be a part of the solution to end littering,” he added. “Even small, simple actions can help, from reducing single-use plastics to recognizing that food waste is litter, every effort counts.”

State departments of transportation are involved in a number of beautification and trash removal efforts.

For example, three New Mexican state agencies – the New Mexico Department of Transportation, New Mexico Department of Tourism, and New Mexico Department of the Environment – recently awarded a total of $4.7 million in grants to 97 local entities to support litter removal and community cleanup projects as part of a new state beautification campaign.

New Mexico’s new “Breaking Bad Habits” campaign seeks to encourage state residents to preserve New Mexico’s “unparalleled landscape” by removing litter, preventing illegal dumping, and other related efforts.

In May, the Utah Department of Transportation launched a new volunteer litter removal program called “Keeping Utah Beautiful” – a program designed to make it easy for members of the public to go online and sign up for a one-time cleanup of state roads.

The agency said these volunteer cleanups will supplement the work of Utah DOT crews who regularly pick up litter statewide. To ensure volunteer safety, “Keeping Utah Beautiful” participants will not clean interstates or some state routes, the Utah DOT stressed – and requires that program volunteers be a minimum 14 years of age.

On another front, to make roadway debris removal operations faster and safer, the South Carolina Department of Transportation started installing “lane blades” on select highway incident response vehicles in 2023.

Meanwhile, the Mississippi Department of Transportation launched a new anti-litter webpage as part of a renewed statewide anti-littering campaign that kicked off in August 2023 – a “one-stop hub” that contains information about the state’s Adopt-a-Highway program, Mississippi litter statistics and resources, stormwater pollution information, anti-litter resources for school teachers, and much more.

And in April 2023, the Illinois Department of Transportation launched a new public outreach effort called “Think Before You Throw!” as part of its ongoing awareness campaign to reduce littering on state highways and roads.

That “Think Before You Throw!” initiative aims to reduce roadside litter along the state’s more than 150,000 miles of roads by raising awareness of the negative environment impact of trash, for both state residents and the nearly 100 million tourists who visit annually, the agency said.