Every year, motorists toss the equivalent of mountains of trash into roadside ditches in Minnesota. And every year, volunteers like Adrienne Buboltz help pick it up.
Buboltz and members of the Detroit Lakes Noon Rotary Club have been cleaning up a segment of Hwy. 10 outside the northwestern Minnesota city for the past three decades through the state Department of Transportation's Adopt a Highway program, which marks its 30th anniversary this year.
"I'm kind of fussy how things look around Detroit Lakes," said Buboltz, who co-chairs the club's cleanup efforts. "This is a tourist area and we want it to look nice."
Littering is a misdemeanor in Minnesota punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, or 90 days in jail, or both. But that doesn't stop drivers from tossing everything from empty cigarette packs to pop bottles and even toilet seats, luggage and clothing into the weeds and reeds along a road. Sometimes they inadvertently lose valuables there, such as wallets and cellphones.
The most disgusting items jettisoned are dirty diapers. The most infuriating items are the ones drivers toss out the window in front of teams cleaning up along the road, Buboltz said.
"Some have no respect for others," she said. "Some people take pride, others don't."
Add it all up, and volunteers representing businesses, community organizations, churches and school groups from across the state spent more than 272,000 hours last year collecting rubbish and filling 40,000 yellow trash bags, said Ann McLellan, MnDOT's Adopt a Highway state coordinator. That was 4,000 more bags of trash than were collected in 2018.
MnDOT launched the Adopt a Highway in 1990 after Gov. Rudy Perpich visited Texas to speak with Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady, about that state's anti-litter campaign called, "Don't Mess with Texas." By last year, Minnesota had 3,800 groups picking up trash along 4,200 miles of metro and rural highways. The Detroit Lakes Rotary is one of 475 groups that have been active since the program's inception.