“My life,” says Julie Slavet, “is all about tires.” Slavet is exaggerating — but only slightly. As the executive director of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership, part of her job is to help improve Tacony Creek Park, a 300-acre preserve in Northeast Philadelphia. And for the last couple years, that’s meant dealing with illegally dumped tires.
More
To the south of 86th Street in Southwest Philadelphia’s Eastwick neighborhood you can’t drive more than a few yards on the cross streets before you run into concrete barriers. “We had them put up the barricades since they would pull back in the cul-de-sac and dump,” says Leonard Stewart, a longtime Eastwick resident and community
More
In July 2020, after spending several months of the pandemic wondering whether her trash and recycling would be picked up, Sarah Ausprich was frustrated. When it was collected, Ausprich, a resident of Philly’s East Passyunk neighborhood, watched sanitation crews repeatedly combine her trash and recycling in the same truck. Disillusioned by curbside collection, she decided
More
On October 2 a large pile of tires was dumped below the Whitaker Avenue Bridge in Tacony Creek Park. One tire lodged in a forked trunk of a tree growing below the bridge. Two others had hooked a branch of another tree and remained suspended about 15 feet up in the air. A tire dropped
More
How many empty plastic water bottles did you see on the ground today? How about chip bags or blunt wrappers? Plastic litter is so abundant and widespread that it fades into the background, but a new initiative of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University is employing artwork in an effort to highlight the
More
Emily Rector had grown accustomed to walking by litter on Philadelphia’s streets. The South Philly resident had spent years wishing for a practical solution to the city’s trash problem. So when she saw on Instagram that Terrill Haigler, aka “Ya Fav Trashman,” was involved with launching an app to address the problem, Rector was excited.
More
Step into the outdoor space of Sunflower Philly, a community center at North 5th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, and you are surrounded by vibrant graffiti and street art. Christian “TameArtz” Rodriguez, art director and community manager for Sunflower Philly, explains that graffiti artists from all over the country and world came together
More
On August 19, 2019, Matthew George decided he had enough of the litter lining Germantown’s streets. He created a GoFundMe campaign for a trash-can program he called “I ♥ Thy Hood.” He reached out to his neighbors in the hopes that he could raise enough money to buy 10 44-gallon trash cans for the neighborhood.
More