Thanks to RVA Clean Sweep and its small army of volunteers, Manchester is a little less trashy today.

The volunteer trash crew picked up a whopping 42 bags of litter and 9 bags of recycling walking the streets of Manchester yesterday morning. If those statistics don’t blow your mind, this was apparently an improvement compared to prior volunteer trash pickups in Manchester. Let’s face it folks, Manchester has a littering problem.

It blows my mind to see folks who drive down Hull Street and throw trash out their car windows directly into the street. Or folks who throw used styrofoam food containers right on the sidewalk. Finding used needles in parking lots and sidewalks is sadly not a rare occurrence. And the bus stop at Cowardin and Hull Street regularly looks like a trash tornado came through.

It’s one thing to have an occasional litterer. But a casual observer of the area would reasonably conclude that throwing trash on sidewalks, parking lots, and streets is actually the norm, and not the exception.

So what can we do to reduce litter?

According to littering expert and social psychologist Wesley Schultz of California State University, there are two basic things we can do about litter that are backed by science. First, put more trash cans out. Second, if you see litter, pick it up. That sounds simple, but here is what Schultz has to say about the science of the topic from an article at The Allegheny Front entitled “The Psychology of Littering.”

“We found that the distance to a trash receptacle was the strongest predictor of littering,” Schultz says. “So the farther away you are from a trash can or a recycling container, the more likely you are to litter.”

And it also appears that the presence of litter, breeds more littering.

“The presence of existing litter was strongly predictive of littering behavior. So if you’re in a place that’s already highly littered, you’re much more likely to litter than if you’re in a place that’s clean or free of litter.”

So Manchester, it seems as if we need to work with the city to get some more trash cans. And if you see some trash lying around, please pick it up and throw it away!