James Island residents concerned with debris along roadways

JAMES ISLAND, S.C. (WCSC) - Some James Island residents are concerned with the amount of litter they have been seeing along their roadways.

Recently one resident, Christine Kitch posted pictures of debris along Harbor View Road on James Island on an app called Nextdoor, a social media app for neighborhoods, which got many other residents’ attention.

Kitch says one day this week she saw crews on Harbor View Road setting up to perform maintenance such as mowing and weed whacking.

The following day she says all of the trash had been mown over and was in pieces. Kitsch says when she went to pick up the trash by hand it ended up being 800 pieces total, 357 of which was plastic.

“People have been outraged on the app about this post and it’s not shocking to see that because when you see your whole entryway to your neighborhood and city trashed like that it looked like a large rat came through, chewed everything up, and deposited it back out. It looks disgusting,” she says.

Kitch expressed her concern about the wildlife and marshes that this impacts.

The Woodland Shores Road coalition founder Adam Friend also says he worries about the debris getting into the marshes. He says he’d like to see better clean-up efforts from the South Carolina Department of Transportation and citizens properly disposing of their garbage.

“Even worse when you have a lawn mower service that’s being paid for by SCDOT to just not pick it up before they run it over and chop it into millions of pieces which makes it a lot easier to be traveled over into the marshes and water and habitat,” he says.

Friend says that it would be helpful if citizens knew ahead of time when crews would be mowing so that they could pick up the trash beforehand instead of it getting mowed over and making it harder to clean.

Kitch says she first noticed that trash was an issue in her community after going on a lot of walks. She says she started carrying a big bag with her every time she would go on a walk and pick up the trash herself. Kitsch says sometimes she would spend an hour or so doing bigger pickups, meaning around 300 to 500 pieces of litter.

She says for the last two years she has been using an app called Anecdata through the South Carolina Aquarium to track every piece of trash that she has picked up.

“I’ve been tracking every single little pickup I’ve been doing and because my kids went to school in the past two years I have actually been doing it pretty much daily throughout the week collecting these little pickups,” she says.

Kitch says she’s been thinking about the right time to bring this issue to the public because she didn’t want to bring it up with minimal data. She says that she doesn’t expect every person to track the amount of litter they pick up, but that in this situation the data she has collected is important in trying to see change.

A spokesperson for SCDOT provided the following statement:

SCDOT encourages members of the public to report any issue on a state-maintained road to us directly at 855-467-2368 or they can submit a maintenance work request on our website.

We have also let our local maintenance crew know of the issue.

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