If you’re concerned about the state of our environment, you may be surprised to learn about an apparently new way to pollute our pristine North Fork. Drive along routes 105, 51 and 94 in Riverhead or Route 48 in Southold and you’ll see that Suffolk County is mowing the grass. That’s great but they’re doing that without picking up the roadside trash first. So we now have grass plus an appalling mix of shreds of paper, plastic and metal.
As chair of the anti-litter committee for the Town of Riverhead, I’ve reached out repeatedly to county and state officials, who claim their crews are picking up trash before they mow. This is not the case. I suspect that since this part of the job is not in the union contract, the crews are just mowing right over all the trash. Is this what we want for our community? I believe that one reason people enjoy coming out to the North Fork is because they see how trashy Nassau County and New York City medians and grassy areas have become due to this practice.
In addition to spreading micro plastics along the medians and shoulders of our roads, imagine the damage to the equipment from lashing through glass and metal — equipment that we taxpayers are subsidizing. It would make more sense to have the crews actually go out and pick up the trash before mowing. I see this practice happening further west and it’s turning our environment into a mess. Is it laziness or another issue that our politicians just don’t want to tackle? I have reached out to Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, the Suffolk County Highway Department, Legislator Catherine Stark and Assemblywoman Jodi Giglio (whose office also contacted to the highway department) and always get the same response: the crews are picking up the garbage first.
Getting into the weeds on this, there was one correspondence which said the crews are picking up the “big” pieces of trash. But hat counts as “big?” No response. So, I guess the question remains: wouldn’t it be better for our environment to have all the garbage picked up before mowing? Any piece left on the grass becomes thousands of little scraps of plastic, metal and glass.
Our committee worked tirelessly to solve one instance of this type of lawn maintenance at a commercial property on Route 58 in Riverhead, where crews at Walgreens had been ignoring the trash while cutting the grass. It took a visit to the store, multiple phone calls and emails over two months to get the corporate office to stop this practice. Now, when you go to Walgreens, I hope you see a nicely manicured lawn without tiny fragments of litter. If not, please let the committee know. (The trash in the Walgreens parking lot is another sad story.)
Our committee holds townwide cleanups in the spring and fall that attract between 80 and 200 people — all of whom are passionate about keeping our community beautiful. The committee is calling on our elected officials to step up and resolve this problem. We encourage you to contact them as well to help bring an end to this practice.
Deborah Wetzel is chairperson of the Riverhead Town anti-litter committee and a regular contributor to Times Review Media Group publications.