High-school students address the litter problem in New Paltz

When high-school students Andrew Geher and Tiernan McCarthy-Kenney took a shortcut from the Plaza Diner parking lot through to the McDonald’s property in New Paltz last week, they found they were disgusted by what they saw: the amount of garbage that had collected along that short path across the edge of a wooded property behind the fast-food joint was vast. “It was more garbage than I’d ever seen in my life,” Geher recalled. “I’ve never been super-environmental, but it hit me. Something needs to change.”

Change it did. The two of them and another friend showed up last Friday, and filled eleven bags of garbage. Geher said he found doing the cleanup fun and rewarding, and he decided he would solicit help to continue it. He created a Facebook account to recruit people to help out, His post surpassed a thousand likes in short order. 

Realizing that he was tapping into something bigger, Geher decided to name his movement “Environmental Activism: Restoring the Hope” and raise money for supplies, including biodegradable garbage bags. Geher now wants to clean up other areas around New Paltz, organizing regular events for that purpose.

The larger goal is to educate people not to throw garbage on the ground. Geher is by no means the first person to address the problem. Public-service campaigns have been in existence at least since Earth Day was started 50 years ago, and a local cleanup effort, New Paltz CleanSweep, is usually held in April. That’s the day when volunteers come together to pick up what others have tossed aside. It’s been under the auspices of the New Paltz Community Improvement Team (CIT) in recent years, and in a 2017 interview CIT member Sue Stegen agreed that educating people not to litter in the first place would be preferable to cleaning it up after the fact. 

Geher agrees. But education will take time.

There’s still so much here

“It looked like it had been accumulating over decades,” Geher said after the initial effort. “We found gloves and bags, as if someone else tried to clean it up, and gave up.”

Andrew Geher’s father Glenn, a psychology professor at SUNY New Paltz, was among those helping out. Hauling a cooler up the slope toward the McDonald’s lot, the elder Geher reported having had  nothing to do with organizing the cleanup. “I’m into activism, and try to instill it in my kids, but this is amazing,” he said. “I didn’t even know about it.”

Returning to that original parcel just five days later, the younger Geher complained that it looked nearly as bad as it had when he’d undertaken the first cleanup. Combing the edge of the Tops parking lot, he zeroed in on tiny items like ear buds and cigarette butts. “Every little cigarette butt matters,” he said. “There’s still so much here.” 

Though the area of focus borders the McDonald’s and Tops Plaza properties, most of the woods there are part of 257-259 Main Street. Doree Lipson, a clinical social worker, purchased that property under a corporate name from the Chamber of Commerce early this year. She undertook a massive cleanup when she had a dumpster available during renovations, describing removing televisions and other large objects. It appears that the current accumulation — including a couch — has happened in the past four to five months. 

Lipson said she had seen Geher’s post, and would have shown up herself but for a full day with clients. Acknowledging responsibility for the condition of the property, Lipson said that the pandemic has made it more challenging to focus on her plans for that land. It’s possible that some of New Paltz’s largely unseen homeless population are using those woods, as they would be out of sight there and more likely to be undisturbed.

A message left for Jim Kempner of Kempner Associates, the company that owns the Tops Plaza, was not returned by press time.

A manager at McDonald’s donated gloves and garbage bags for the effort, and gave clearance to use the restaurant’s dumpster, according to Geher.

The crowdfunding is nearing its $500 goal.

Trashboyyy weighs in

Most of the people who showed up for the Wednesday morning cleanup were teenagers. One of these was SUNY Ulster student Henry Ferland, who posts about picking up trash under the name “trashboyyy” on Instagram and Tiktok. Ferland discovered roadside trash when he resolved for the new year to take a daily run, and “every day I would run past all this trash, and it would make me angry.” Those runs became “trash runs,” with the garbage going into a backpack

A friend suggested posted videos of the effort. Ferland sets increasingly higher goals for numbers of pieces of litter picked up, having just passed 13,000 of a goal of 50,000 pieces.

Others have worked to raise awareness through social media. The owner of one Instagram account,  newpaltzgarbage, said that the account was created in April 2016. “At the time, I was living and working in the village and commuted on foot every day. I was struck by how many discarded or lost items I saw on my walks; some things I found were funny in their misplaced context, so I decided to start documenting them. When I started the account, I was mostly noticing things that were really obviously out of place, but as time went on, I felt like I started to notice garbage more and more often — I could photograph multiple items on one walk. It became a little less funny and a little more disgusting, especially when you pass the same garbage every day for weeks.”

This individual, who prefers to remain anonymous, approves of Geher’s efforts. “I recently saw a post on the New Paltz Facebook group about a couple of guys collecting several bags of trash on a path between McDonald’s and Tops. That was really cool to see because I feel like generally people don’t care. Sometimes I wonder if people even notice. Sometimes I feel like there’s so much, it’s impossible to not notice! I think it’s a little ironic, because I feel like New Paltz is perceived as being very green. From my observations, New Paltz is no better about litter than anywhere else. It’s everywhere.”

This year’s pandemic has had something of an impact on trash. For one, it’s possible that the overall accumulation is more right now because there was no Clean Sweep event, but Stegen — who helped organize that event under the auspices of the CIT before passing it off to town youth director Jim Tinger for this year — said that Clean Sweep has only ever been part of a larger strategy to pick up litter. Some roadside trash is removed by probationers, Stegen said, and there have been group efforts dating back at least to the mid-1980s here, when members of the New Paltz Garden Club would pick up along Main Street. “I certainly applaud that young man for what he’s doing . . . a lot of community action is needed,” Stegen said.

Geher believes litter may have dropped in the initial days of the “pause” in New York, but Ferland and the newpaltzgarbage account owner both agree that the most noticeable impact since that time is a marked increase in disposable masks being disposed of by just being dropped on the ground. As Ferland says in one video, “If you have a littering problem, keep a plastic bag in your car and put all your trash in there instead of throwing it out the window.”