Cleaning up the streets of Greenville, NC with Charlie my invisible parrot

Hey. I'm Paul. Nice to meet you. I'm the Litter Pirate.

LP started as a litter education project. I currently live in Eastern North Carolina. I've lived all over the US and where I've settled now turns out to be the most littered. 12 years ago when I searched 'litter North Carolina' on various social media sites I got cats. Cat litter. How could this place be so trashed, much more trashed than the 6 other states I've lived in, and no one was talking about it? No one was hash-tagging about it?

So, I started litter picking. Originally I called my project the Jones County Litter Co-op. I had just moved to Jones County NC from Seattle (where everything is a co-op lol). I thought people would wake up when they started seeing me pick along our roadsides. I thought they would join me (let's co-op!). I thought they would finally address the problem. They didn't.

I found a littered fork in the road. No really, I did. But it was also a figurative fork in the road. Keep picking or keep picking and do something more to make change. I was a teacher (still in education) so it made sense to dive into environmental education. Let's start a program where Litter Pirate goes around and teaches kids about litter and why it's bad.

I did for a minute. Dressed as a pirate, the Litter Pirate, I started doing small talks and booking larger school assemblies. And then...COVID. No more visitors, no more assemblies. I reorganized, started the litter pirate podcast, and kept picking. 

2021 turned out to be a little worse than 2020 for my little Litter Pirate project. Frustrated with the lack of innovation from litter picking organizations  (why did I think they would start!?), I learned a lot about plastic recycling and its ties to big oil (a.k.a. big plastic), litter picking organizations and their ties to big oil (KAB: I'm talking about you ya jerks), law enforcement and their non-prioritization of litter enforcement, and about so many organizations content in picking the same amount of litter from the same places year after year with no goals for more, no strategies for something different, and no support for upstream solutions like single-use plastic bans. Arrrrgh! turned to ugh! real quick.

So, I threw in the towel. I still took a small bag with me and picked litter when I walked the dog around the few blocks by my house. We moved about an hour inland, to Greenville, NC. It started out great just like it did in the summer of 2014 when I moved to Jones County. It was summer here when I arrived (just like it was there) and the weeds hid the litter. Fall approached and man, are we trashed here too! And so, Litter Pirate has been kinda reborn: I'm picking large bags again, almost every weekend, and it feels, well, as it always has: good and bad. But I think it's just a part of who I am. Once a week I'm the Litter Pirate! You could be that too. Join me...savvy?
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