Hundreds of pounds of trash — enough to fill five huge, industrial-sized trash bags — were removed from Fort Circle Park in 5A09 today. This is what a little over an hour of doing the National Park Service’s job looks like in 5A09, which has parks that have been neglected by NPS for decades. I found an air mattress, dozens of random car parts, countless glass and plastic bottles, cutlery, plastic food containers, plastic and paper bags, bottles that had been there so long tree roots were going through them, and hundreds of pounds of other various trash items while cleaning.
It shouldn’t be on DC residents to clean up NPS-owned land in the District, they should be doing that themselves — which, judging by the amount of time it looked like some of the trash had been there, they haven’t done in at least several years. If I’m elected, I will put constant pressure on NPS to take better care of the parks in our area, and will push for ANC 5A to use some of their large unspent annual budget on anti-littering education signs throughout the parks in our area, and explore ways to get trash cans installed and regularly emptied along our park trails.
On a final note, DC’s very small tax on plastic bags is not nearly sufficient; we really need to outright ban plastic bags and increase the tax on paper bags, and follow the lead of the European Union and other countries in banning all single-use plastics in the District. DC likes to think of itself as being very progressive, but on a lot of metrics we have fallen far behind the rest of the world in adopting measures to protect the environment.
Zachary Ammerman for ANC5A09 
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