Mount Rainier Green Team

As the weather warms up many of us will wind up near the Anacostia River or one of its tributaries.  You may notice that there is often lots of trash in it. There is no way we can have a swimmable, fishable, drinkable river if we can’t stop it from being trashed.  That is why in 2010 under the Clean Water Act, EPA, Maryland and Washington, DC established a limit on trash in the Anacostia. The limit, called a TMDL, was set to bring trash levels to zero.  That’s no trash what so ever.

Our local governments have been doing a lot to solve this problem.  Prince George’s County and Washington, DC have both banned styrofoam, and DC has also taxed plastic bags, but that only gets you so far.  Trash still finds it way into the river.

Of course most Mounties aren’t litterbugs, but that doesn’t mean all trash gets thrown out properly and some of that litter gets washed into the rivers during big rain storms.

That is where the Bandalong Litter TrapTM comes in.  The Bandalong is a type of floating trash trap that gets installed on a stream and catches the trash.  Since the Bandalong floats and trash floats it can collect the trash while fish can still get under it.

Prince George’s County Department of the Environment in partnership with Anacostia Riverkeeper through a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust will be installing the first trap in Prince George’s County under the bridge under 31st Street by Richardson Park.  The bandalong will likely be installed this spring and there will be an event to kick off the clean up so stay tuned. The trap will be inspected and cleaned out regularly but the Green Team is also interested in finding residents to help clean it up once or twice a year, email mtrainiergreenteam@gmail.com if interested in helping.

A few months ago I came home to a soggy phone book in a plastic bag thrown into the bushes near my porch steps. I was surprised to receive a phone book since I don’t even have a landline. If you are like me, I threw the book straight into the recycling bin. Most of us remember a time when phone books were extremely useful before the internet. It is how we found friends’ or businesses’ phone numbers. But today most of us look up numbers online and have friends’ numbers saved in our phones.

So why do we still get phone books? Apparently companies have fought regulations to phase out phone books, specifically the yellow pages, because they contain ads that make these companies money.

According to the nonprofit YellowPagesGoesGreen.org, in order to print the over 500 million phone books every year distributed in the US companies use over:

• 19 million trees;
• 1.6 billion pounds of paper;
• 7.2 million barrels of oil; and
• 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

Yuck! Thats a lot of resources to make something that often just gets thrown out.

In the end, municipalities pay millions of dollars to trash or recycle stacks of books. Several municipalities and states are fighting phone book deliveries but currently almost every household gets a phone book each year.

There is good news though. You can opt out by visiting https://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/

It is simple to do and will help the environment.

In the meantime, if you get an unwanted phone book delivered at your house, please remember to remove the plastic bag and then put your phone book in the recycling bin. Plastic bags cannot be recycled in Mount Rainier’s curbside recycling.

Just three days before we celebrated America’s independence, PG County initiated our freedom from a lesser know menace: expanded polystyrene (EPS), more well known by a certain brand name, styrofoam.

EPS is often used in cups to serve hot beverages, carry out food, or package goods for transport (in peanut form). But it’s not economical to recycle EPS so it end up in landfills where it takes hundreds of years to biodegrade. Even worse, styrofoam often just winds up as litter on our city streets and parks, where it is an eyesore and a great water-collecting mosquito breeding ground. Wherever EPS goes, it leaches into our water system and can poison fish, birds, sea turtles, etc.

The new rule means that businesses, particularly restaurants, cannot legally provide EPS to customers. The exceptions are when food is prepared off site,  prepackaged, or raw meat. PG County has started a massive outreach to business but not everyone may have gotten the memo. That’s where you come in. If you order take out in PG County and still get styrofoam containers, there are several things you can do:

1. Tell the business about the ban. They just might not know.
2. Call PG County 311, visit http://countyclick.princegeorgescountymd.gov, or use the CountyClick311 app to submit a complaint.
3. If all else fails, order elsewhere.