Melting Snow Reveals Debris

As the snow is steadily melting, a winter’s trash is reappearing all about Omaha. The streets are especially a mess of flattened cans, plastic liquor bottles, glass beer bottles and a variety of other discards.

Along Happy Hollow Boulevard, most prevalent were dozens of vodka shooters and half-pints thrown out on a stretch between Underwood Avenue and Dodge Street. Occasionally, there was a tossed wine bottle, especially with nearby beer cans along Hamilton Street.

Plastic drink bottles abound as well, and these and any other plastic debris belong in the trash, not to be taken by a spring rain into Happy Hollow Creek, then down into Wood Creek to cause a garbage patch at a beaver pond in Elmwood Park.

It is a mess anyone can help get rid of. Residents should get an early start on a fresh spring by cleaning a block of their neighborhood. And by putting trash in a can.

This letter was published in the Public Pulse of the Omaha World-Herald on March 10, 2010. The letter was prompted by the more than a dozen plastic bags of trash cleaned from the neighborhood streets the previous few days.