Cleaning Up After the Litterbugs on Her Own

Bottles - both glass and plastic - cans, wrappers, cups, newspapers, grocery bags, a bedroom slipper, all manner of things can be found along roadways in South Carolina.

Barbara Maguire knows this well, she's found plenty of all of them in the past few years. A Charleston native, Maguire, who is retired after a career in which she ran a couple of retail stores downtown, now lives in Cantebury Woods off Ashley River Road. Every couple of weeks she dons a navy blue apron and her iPod Nano, grabs four or five garbage bags and her Litter Picker tool, and heads out to clean trash off the side of Ashley River Road near Church Creek and .

"This is my neighborhood, this is my front yard," Maguire said. "Once you realize there's no government entity that is going to do it, it's up to us."

"If not me, who? If not now, when?"

Maguire said she typically spends a couple of hours about once every two weeks picking up trash along this stretch of road and fills those four or five trash bags each time.

Sarah Lyles, who works in public relations for Palmetto Pride and Keep America Beautiful, said in 2011 the 29,000 volunteers that work with Palmetto Pride cleaned up more than 4,750,000 pounds of garbage along South Carolina's roadways.

"A majority of it is recyclable," Lyles said. "It's a combination of plastic, aluminum and newspaper."

Palmetto Pride is holding its Fifth Annual Francis Marion National Forest Cleanup 8 a.m. - noon on Saturday, Feb. 4 starting at Forest Service Office located at 2967 Steed Creek Road in Huger.

Adopt-A-Highway, another litter removal program managed by the Clemson Cooperative Extension Service, cleaned up approximately 50,000 pounds of litter from primary and secondary roadways in the Palmetto state in 2011 with the help of about 2,000 volunteers according to a statement from Charleston County Clemson Extension Service Adopt-A-Highway Coordinator Angela Crouch.

The next Adopt-A-Highway cleanup program is also scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 4 (Feb. 11 if the weather is bad on the fourth). Volunteers can pick up supplies for the clean up from 9 a.m. - 3 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 1 at at S.C. Department of Transportation’s Charleston Maintenance facility located at 2401 Maintenance Way in North Charleston.

Maguire said she looked into the Adopt-A-Highway program and has tried to enlist others to help her, but not everyone has the time.

"I am retired now, so I do have the time," she said. "It's good exercise, it's cathartic."

She said she has also tried to get the South Carolina General Assembly to re-institute a 5-cent deposit for glass bottles.

"The worst offenders are glass bottles and metal containers," Maguire said. "If they'd re-institute the nickel deposit for bottles it wouldn't be trash anymore, it'd be like throwing money out your window every time you tossed one."

Maguire also picks up plenty of plastic grocery bags, which she calls "this century's terrible fruit," because they catch in tree limbs and hang there essentially forever.

Maguire will continue to clean up the road near her home, she said, because no one else will.

"I wish it wasn't so close to a busy road, I keep my iPod in to drown out the traffic noise," she said as half a dozen cars whizzed by at 40-plus mph on the road less than 10 feet away.

"I wonder if people think I'm serving restitution, and if so what for," Maguire joked. "I try not to wear stripes."