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Madeline Rose, a 5th grader at Battle Academy in Chattanooga, took first place in the middle school division of Scenic Tennessee's 2005 photo contest, "Message in the Bottles,"for this shot of geese foraging among the container litter at a lake in Soddy Daisy. |
In the fall and winter of 2005-2006, in a series of cleanups known as "X Marks the Spot," volunteers across the state collected beverage-container litter separately from other litter, using 13-gallon drawstring garbage bags in order to get a consistent count by volume, and marking the container-only bags with a red X. The goal was to find out just how much of Tennessee's litter consists of beverage containers. (See the next image for results.)
The photos at right and below are from a cleanup in Mount Juliet, Wilson County. |
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Results of the X Marks the Spot cleanups:
number of cleanups: 23
number of counties: 14
miles of road picked up: 31.99
number of volunteers: 219
total bags of litter: 637.5
bags of beverage containers only: 319.5
highest proportion of containers: 78.5%
lowest proportion of containers: 24.56%
Average proportion of beverage containers: 50.12 percent |
| As part of X Marks the Spot, members of the Overmountain Chapter of Trout Unlimited (from left, Ron Harrington, Gary Barrigar and Richard Brosmore) filled 21 bags of litter at the TWRA put-in and approach road on the Watauga River in Carter County. Of the total, 13 bags (61.9 percent) were bottles and cans. |
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Chad Comer of Red Boiling Springs lives near two bars, and every few months he picks up "nothing but beer bottles." His "X Marks the Spot" cleanup resulted in 30 bags of litter, 22 of them beverage containers.
Wonder how many of the litterers paid a $500 fine? |
| Mark C. Campen, education and membership director of the Tennessee Izaak Walton League, won first place in the adult division of the 2005 photo contest for capturing this cascade of beverage containers spilling into Third Creek in Knoxville. |
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Another image from the photo contest: Gracie Young, 4th grader at Edmondson Elementary School in Brentwood (shown at left with her family at a reception for winners at the Frist Center for the Performing Arts in Nashville in November 2005), took second place in the middle-school division with her image of a frog resting on a lily pad. A flattened plastic bottle is part of what Gracie called "the nursery." |
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| Ronn Duff, Jr., of Tazewell won third place in the adult division of the photo contest with this eye-catching image of Tennessee trash. Lots of valuable aluminum here! |
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Spring 2007: With the Pyramind rising in the the background, the shores of the Wolf River in Memphis are lined with plastic bottles and other debris following a heavy rain. Karen Soro, who took this photo, is a Memphis realtor who lives and sells homes in the upscale Harbor Town community. She says it's almost impossible to sell Harbor Town properties when their front lawns and walking trails look like this. |
Floating containers and other debris on McKellar Lake in Memphis. This photo by James Baker won second place (adult division) in the 2005 photo contest.
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Here's another of James Baker's photos, taken along Manassas Road at I-240, Memphis. James is chair of the container deposit legislative committee of the Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club. James in particular and the Sierra Club in general have been staunch supporters in Tennessee's push for a bottle bill. |
| In March 2006, these Bolton and Arlington high school students picked up IH Park in Lakeland (near Memphis). The white bags are containers; the black bags are everything else. |
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