At her inauguration on January 2, 2024, Cherelle Parker said, “We will make Philadelphia the safest, cleanest and greenest big city in the nation.” Philadelphia has long been plagued by litter, poorly-contained household trash and illegal dumping (“short dumping”) of waste that should be taken directly to a commercial dump: old tires, debris from construction, demolition and apartment cleanouts. “We will launch a new approach to addressing quality of life issues, like illegal short dumping, cleaning up litter and graffiti, fixing potholes and removing abandoned cars — starting by focusing on the hardest-hit neighborhoods,” the new mayor said.
Over the following year Parker’s administration rolled out or expanded a collection of programs overseen by the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives, headed by former Department of Streets commissioner Carlton Williams. Here, Grid takes a look at what the “clean” programs under Clean and Green have accomplished.
In early February 2024 the Parker administration split the Streets Department, which had handled trash and recycling in Philadelphia in addition to the design, maintenance and repair of roads implied by its name. Trash and recycling now fall under a Department of Sanitation, itself overseen by the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives. The Office of Clean and Green promised to use a “data driven approach” to respond to complaints of graffiti, unkempt vacant lots, short dumping and abandoned cars.
The City’s fiscal year 2025 budget (which took effect in July 2024) increased funding to the Taking Care of Business Clean Corridors Program, which channels money through City Council member offices to private organizations tasked with cleaning 129 corridors, up from 49 previously. The budget also funded an additional 1,500 Bigbelly trash cans on sidewalks around the city.
Two initiatives aimed to make it easier for Philadelphians to dispose of excess solid waste. In September the City began collecting large items such as household appliances and tires by appointment. In early December the Department of Sanitation rolled out twice-a-week trash collection in Center City and part of South Philadelphia.
In May the City embarked on a wave of street cleaning that covered the entire city over 13 weeks, an expansion of the street cleaning program piloted under the Kenney administration. In November the City launched a second citywide cleanup effort that ran through January 27, 2025.

How clean?
The City offers some statistics on cleaning initiatives on its Philly Stat 360 website — how many vacant properties have been cleaned and sealed; how comprehensive trash and recycling pickup has been; and its response time for complaints about dumping, abandoned cars and graffiti — grounding them with a three-year span. These show that the response time to illegal dumping complaints has dropped by about five months between 2023 and 2024, though the decline was not as steep as between 2022 and 2023.
A spokesperson for the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives responded to Grid’s request for numbers with a table of statistics from the second citywide cleanup, and a press release from September included statistics from the first. The Sanitation Department cleaned 18,318 blocks in the first cleanup and, as of mid-January, had cleaned 11,504 in the second. The Philadelphia Parking Authority removed 1,003 unregistered vehicles — and then 1,097 more. In the two cleanups, the Philadelphia Water Department conducted 86 and 40 instances of “Stormwater Infrastructure Cleanup,” respectively.
Last summer Nic Esposito, who served as the director for the City’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet under the Kenney administration from 2016 to 2020, visited litter and dumping hotspots after the first citywide cleanup, which he described in a commentary for Grid. He found that many of the cleanups missed a lot of waste and that littering and dumping largely continued after the cleanups.
Maurice M. Sampson II, the Eastern Pennsylvania director of Clean Water Action, has 40 years of experience with Philadelphia solid waste issues, starting as the City’s first recycling director in 1985. He says that while fighting blight by cleaning up litter and dumped waste is important, it is bound to be expensive and futile if the City doesn’t attack the sources of the waste. “Prevention, abatement, enforcement and education — you need a balance of those to eliminate dumping and reduce litter. We’re spending 95% of the budget on abatement. Prevention and enforcement has not been part of it.” Sampson points to the City’s plastic bag ban, which he helped draft, as an example of the kind of enforcement and education needed.
In response to questions emailed by Grid, Clean and Green’s spokesperson writes that the City has been stepping up enforcement actions against illegal dumpers. “There is a new process for capturing illegal dumpers using cameras and the issuing of notices of violation by the Illegal Dumping Task Force. The intergovernmental collaboration between the Law Department, Police Department, Office of Clean and Green Initiatives and Sanitation Department has successfully prosecuted 40 new cases. As of November 30, 2024, [they] have obtained judgments totaling $3,075,513.39.”
Sampson argues that the City could be doing more to enforce anti-dumping laws, such as by seizing vehicles used to illegally dump debris.
Grid reached out to people who deal with short-dumping hotspots around the City to hear about the results of the City’s cleanup efforts.
The Cobbs Creek Ambassadors is a volunteer group that conducts cleanups in the park along the western edge of the city. Richard Guffanti, a volunteer with the group, responded to an email saying that, based on their statistics of how much trash they removed from the park, “it looks like Cobbs Creek Park is getting cleaner.” In 2023 106 cleanup events yielded 10.3 tons of trash, and in 2024 100 cleanup events removed 8.2 tons.
I haven’t seen the departmental commitment as real to dumping as it has been in the past year.”
— Justin DiBerardinis, Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership
In West Philadelphia, Derek Rigby routinely files Philly311 requests for dumping along the 53rd Street bridge near Whitby Avenue. Grid spoke with him for a 2023 article about dumping and again this January to see if anything has changed. “Since we last spoke I periodically continue to see dumping,” Rigby says. He keeps logging complaints with 311. “It doesn’t stay out as long, it seems, but I don’t know if that’s just since Mayor Parker took office.”
The Enterprise Center is one of the groups stewarding commercial corridors under Taking Care of Business, contracting with a private company to clean 52nd Street. According to a media representative, they have seen a littering index improvement of two points (on a four-point scale) since they began picking up trash. About the amount of illegal dumping, however, the representative says, “There has not been a particular uptick or downtick.”
Tacony Creek Park has long served as a dumping ground. In December 2022 Grid reported on the efforts of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership to keep up with dumped debris and the slow response of the City in responding when, for example, heaps of tires were dumped off of the Whitaker Avenue bridge in the fall of 2022.
The partnership’s executive director, Justin DiBerardinis, says they have seen a dramatic improvement in the City’s response to dumping in the past year. A major dumping before the holidays drew a swift reaction, with police showing up right away, followed by personnel from other departments. “There were multiple departments saying, ‘How do we resolve this problem going forward?’ I’m experiencing departments that feel like they’re being held accountable for this,” DiBerardinis says. “As someone who has been in and out of city government and nonprofit partners for 20 years, I haven’t seen the departmental commitment as real to dumping as it has been in the past year.”

Near Tacony Creek Park, the 215 People’s Alliance has been fighting dumping along a winding stretch of Newtown Avenue nicknamed Snake Road. “Early in the pandemic I would come up Snake Road going home, and there was so much stuff dumped that it worked its way out from the side into the middle of the street, and I had to go up the side into the hill to get by,” says Dallas Herbert Sr., who serves on the steering committee of the 215 People’s Alliance. The alliance has worked with their district councilmember (Cherelle Parker up until her mayoral run) to have debris removed, to post warning signs and to set up cameras to monitor the road.
“I’ll tell you, I’ve been fighting this thing for five years now,” Herbert says. “The mayor’s Clean and Green Initiative, I think it’s a great thing. You’ve got to start somewhere.” Herbert says he has seen an improvement over the past year, to the point that the alliance is starting to shift from fighting dumping to safety and beautification efforts along Snake Road.
Anti-litter and anti-dumping advocates such as Herbert emphasize the need to get to the source of litter and dumping to truly solve the problem. “In order to accomplish all that needs to be done we need to get some preventive measures, not just cleaning,” Herbert says. He points to the need to make it easier to legally dispose of loads of debris. Currently local private dumps charge the same for all loads up to one ton, even if a hauler has only a small pickup truck full.
The mayor’s Clean and Green Initiative, I think it’s a great thing. You’ve got to start somewhere.”
— Dallas Herbert Sr., 215 People’s Alliance
Grid asked the City about a proposal backed by the Clean Philadelphia Now campaign and Circular Philadelphia to accept construction and demolition debris at the Sanitation Convenience Centers, where residential households can currently drop off trash such as old appliances and bags of yard waste. According to the Clean and Green spokesperson, “The City’s Sanitation Convenience Centers are designed to accommodate residential, household trash dropped off intermittently. The facilities are not designed and do not have the capacity to capture large volumes of commercial waste. Additionally, the Sanitation Department has been told by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection that a permit is required to collect materials from commercial businesses.”
As Esposito wrote in a commentary on this policy proposal, it would take less than two years to secure the necessary permit, meaning that, with some redesign of the convenience centers, the system could be up and running before the end of Parker’s term.
Tire dumping, in particular, continues in force. A heap of tires off of Torresdale Avenue that Esposito documented during the summer was still there when Grid returned in January. Also in January the Cobbs Creek Ambassadors cleaned up a pile of 180 tires that had been dumped off of Cobbs Creek Parkway. Grid asked the City about the enforcement of laws requiring tire shops to document their waste haulers. In January 2024, Grid found that the Department of Licenses and Inspections was not able to say how many tire dealers it had inspected or how many had been penalized for violations. Grid asked again in December but did not receive a response in time to include in this article.

The future of litter and dumping
Grid asked the Office of Clean and Green Initiatives when twice-weekly trash pickup and weekly street cleaning would go citywide. “Expansion of twice-per-week collections to other areas of the city will take place in the fall of 2025,” the spokesperson responded. Funding to hire 50 additional mechanical street cleaning staff, the statement explains, will allow the City “to expand mechanical sweeping operations into additional geographic areas in 2025.”
“You’ll need to sustain this through the entire Parker administration and probably the mayor who comes next for the citizens of Philadelphia to see a difference, to inspire people to see a difference and believe,” DiBerardinis says. “We’re going to succeed if we pair this with enforcement, outreach and education — the next phase of the work — but you can’t get to that phase if you don’t have solid, reliable remediation.”
As for casual littering, such as chucking fast food waste out of a car window, it could take longer to change a culture that takes litter for granted. “We accept that that happens, and we don’t try to educate people that you shouldn’t do it,” Sampson says. The solution would be “a 16-year program in the schools, so people are taught you don’t do that.”
Sampson says he is pleased that Philadelphia has a mayor dedicated to cleaning up the city but that environmentalists need to demand more. “Clean and Green is about quality of life. It’s getting rid of the blight you are looking at, but it’s not about sustainability, not about closing the loop.”
Sampson points out that Mayor Parker has not emphasized recycling, avoiding the topic during her campaign and not foregrounding it or environmental issues since taking office. “This mayor is not committed to the environment. She is committed to quality of life,” he says. “We have lost a lot of ground since Nutter. If we’re not careful we’re going to lose all that momentum.”
Thanks for this extensive article.
Cobbs Creek Park Ambassadors keeps the park fairly clean with its 10 cleanups a month.
The 20% reduction in trash collected (10 to 8 tons from 2023 to 2024) might be evidence that
“If it looks like a dump it will be treated like a dump” to be true for the average park visitor but not for the short dumpers