Report on Kitsap County's litter shows progress but lacks funding

In recent years, Washington State has invested more time than ever before into litter removal from state highways -- and yet anyone traveling on Highway 3 from Poulsbo to the Pierce County line knows the grassy corridor is often dotted with noticeable waste that draws the ire of residents.

According to the 2023 annual statewide litter report released in March, Washington State's Department of Ecology shows that state crews spent 182,267 hours picking up trash from state highways, county roads, on-ramps and other nearby dump sites last year. In Kitsap, crews spent 10,369 hours removing litter from local routes like Highways 3, 303 and 305 in 2022, a number that increased to 14,664 in 2023. The hours include time that Ecology funds at the county level, but those statistics do not include all efforts by county or municipal governments on litter cleanup, because work funded locally is not always reported back for the statewide report.

Despite the increasing amount of time being put into litter pickup, however, a state official said that only a fraction of highway litter is collected due to a lack of funding and the continued increase in littering both locally and across the state.

“We spend about $12 million dollars per year (on litter removal), and we are able to pick up only about one-fifth of the litter that accumulates,” Amber Smith, the Statewide Litter Prevention Coordinator at Washington State's Department of Ecology, said.

The program's $12 million dollar budget is funded by a .015% tax implement in 1971 on commonly littered items. Smith said that tax rate has not been updated since, despite a rise in costs and the fact that many of the commonly littered items have changed in the 50 years since, to now include materials such as rubber auto products, plastic film and bubble wrap.

The Ecology funding pays for a dedicated three-person litter crew for Kitsap County, working from March until November, along with youth corps groups that are hired and work during summer months on roads locally and around the state. The white bags of collected trash often piled along the highways, now noticeable in some areas of Kitsap, are evidence that their work has begun. State money is also directed back to support county programs, and litter prevention or education efforts.

The state report from 2023 also showed an increase in the miles covered by trash collection crews, with 2,741 miles covered in Kitsap, an increase of more than 1,000 miles from the previous year. However, the actual amount of litter collected decreased year over year by approximately 100,000 pounds, and the amount collected from dump sites dropped by around 170,000 pounds. Smith said that this may be due to some much larger illegal dump sites that were targeted in 2022 and skewed the numbers, and a Kitsap County official said that local dump site numbers were inflated due to several large encampments on county land, which were included in the Ecology statistics.

"In 2022, 295,820 (pounds) were collected from 795 illegal dumpsites. In 2023, it was 122,230 (pounds) for 742 dumpsites," Smith said.

In Kitsap County, more roadside litter was picked up in 2023 (86,172 pounds) than in 2022 (29,236 pounds), according to Caitlin Newman, Kitsap County's Public Works Program Supervisor.

Kitsap County also has dedicated staff to cleaning up and preventing litter on local roads not included in state efforts. County programs include Adopt-a-Spot, where community groups or organizations can volunteer to do litter clean-ups, a monthly roadside clean-up crew of people who have court-ordered community service, and a contracted litter removal service. In just the first quarter of 2024, volunteers through Adopt-a-Spot have already donated more than 500 hours and cleared more than 745 bags of litter in Kitsap County, according to Newman.

Kitsap County is still missing a former primary source of clean-up labor, as a pandemic-era change dissolved the program that allowed inmates at Kitsap County Jail to assist. Penny Sapp, Chief of Corrections for Kitsap County, said that individuals in jail pending trial cannot be assigned work detail before being convicted, essentially ending the program as the majority of the population being held in jail are people awaiting a trial. These crews were responsible for picking up five tons of trash for every 300 miles of road each month in the past, according to the Kitsap County website, but Sapp estimated that it will be years before the program is reinstated.

Anyone interested in helping to the eliminate litter can visit the Washington State Department of Ecology's website to find out how they can contribute, or visit Kitsap County's Adopt-a-Spot page.

Editor's note: This story was updated to include more context on how the state numbers are compiled, and to include Kitsap-specific data on tonnage collected in 2023.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Highway litter in Kitsap an issue despite increase in cleanup hours