It's not just litter -- it's art, and an education tool

Newbury artist will build tower of trash to educate about litter

By Taryn Plumb | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

JULY 24, 2014

MARK LORENZ FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

CYNTHIA SCHARTMAN/ANDREW SIDFORD ARCHITECTS

Take a walk around your neighborhood, and you might be surprised by the number of discarded items strewn along the side of the road.

Carol Baum certainly was, so much so that a little more than two years ago, she began picking up litter one day a week on a 2-mile loop around her Newbury home and cataloging everything she found.

All kinds of bottles, cigarette butts, plastic bags, and takeout containers are among the more common items, but some of her other finds are baffling: the top of a toilet tank, containers of rat poison, carbon dioxide canisters for air rifles, a child’s bicycle, a frozen diaper, and hundreds upon hundreds of nails.

“It’s just distressing that people don’t take better care of the place they’re living,” said Baum, 71, a retired ESL teacher and lifelong painter.

But rather than remain a silent steward of the environment, she’s turning her weekly trash retrievals into a public awareness campaign.

In mid-June, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a public art project, what she’s dubbed a “trash tower.” To be framed by cedar and transparent plastic, it will essentially be a giant receptacle that she plans to fill every week for a year with the detritus retrieved on her regular route.

The 12-foot-tall tower will be installed on the grassy area in front of Newbury Elementary School on Hanover Street, with a large signboard announcing various decomposition and recycling facts.

“I hope people will change their behavior, if they’re litterers,” said Baum, whose work has been shown at various local galleries. “It’s good to have the elementary school involved, because that’s when children learn those behaviors. And I hope the message from the Kickstarter campaign gets out to a broader audience.”

It already has. When she launched the campaign on June 17, she was asking for $3,000 to cover the cost of materials: four posts; four Lexan plastic panels; a cover, lock, and ladder for the tower; and plywood, posts, and paint for the signboard.

In just five days, the project was fully funded — and then some. She raised $4,724, with 154 backers from several states and as far away as Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Portugal.

“A lot of the donations have come from people I don’t know, which is surprising and wonderful,” Baum said.

One backer, Mark Gillan, called the tower idea a “wonderful concept” in a posting on the Kickstarter website and a “great way to give people perspective on this issue.”

Another, Alessandro Cordova, was even moved to do something similar.

“I was so impressed ... because this is something I have been thinking about doing myself and didn’t find the courage to,” he said on the site. “You inspired me.”

Everything over the initial $3,000 donated will be used to dismantle the tower once it’s full, restore the lawn around it, and purchase educational books for the school, such as “Don’t Throw That Away,” “The Adventures of a Plastic Bottle,” and “Recycle! A Handbook for Kids.”

The goal is to have the tower — which will be built by students in the carpentry program at Whittier Vocational Technical Regional High School in Haverhill — up by the fall, said Baum, who also created a related curriculum that she plans to disseminate to elementary school students.

The other educational piece will be the signboard, which will display statistics on decomposition times. According to the National Park Service, it takes one to 12 years for a cigarette butt to break down; 50 to 100 years for an aluminum can; and an estimated 1 million years for a glass bottle.

As environmentally conscious as many people have become in recent years, litter does remain a prevalent problem, according to the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful.

While the actual amount of overall litter is down 61 percent since 1969, the amount of plastic litter has increased 165 percent over those 45 years, based on a recent study done by the organization. All told, there are an estimated 51.2 billion pieces of litter on roadways nationwide.

As Baum has found herself, the most predominant items are tobacco products, paper, and plastic, according to the organization.

In her weekly trips — she does the 2-mile route every Tuesday morning — Baum has picked up thousands of cans, bottles, and cigarette butts, not to mention the occasional odd item such as an intact glass motorcycle windshield, X-rated paraphernalia, and a plastic bag full of dog poop.

Until her retirement in 2011, she said, “I never had time to really do anything for the community.”

So one day in March 2012, she decided to pick up the trash she was noticing on the road where she had walked, jogged, and ridden her bicycle for years.

“I thought, ‘Now I won’t have to do this again for three months,’ but it was back right away,” she said. “I just made the commitment to pick up litter once a week.”

And, she added, “There’s a lot more road that needs to be picked up.”

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