Hitting the Highways to Bag Unsightly Game

“We’re the good guys. We wear the white hats,” Harry Stovall said. He’s the person at Rancho Bernardo’s Hope United Methodist Church who organizes the work for the Adopt-a-Highway program twice a month. You may have seen the sign identifying their 3-mile assigned area on Interstate 15. In San Diego County 156 such groups are involved, most of them in North County. The color of the hard hats these volunteers wear--while they’re helping to save Californian $17 million a year in highway cleaning expenses--is a sensitive matter.

Farther up I-15 in Fallbrook, where the Lions and Lioness Clubs turn out regularly to clean up a 2-mile strip, hat color was a matter of such concern that the club almost didn’t get involved in the program. Pat Kemp, the Adopt-a-Highway chairman there said, “some members were worried they’d be considered drunks.”

But everybody signed up when they learned that Caltrans equipped volunteers with white hats, while those sentenced to highway cleanup as part of probation for driving offenses wear orange hats.

But civic virtue and a white hard hat to prove you’re on the right side of the law aren’t the only reasons to be involved in this cleanup program. Stovall said that what the group encountered on the roadside “reinforced our environmental consciousness about Styrofoam.” The congregation had earlier decided to switch from plastic to biodegradable paper cups and other items at their functions.

Changed consciousness about what people jettison is a big part of the Adopt-a-Highway program, according to its statewide coordinator in Sacramento, Ralph Carhart. “Our objective is to educate about the litter problem,” he said. Participants “learn firsthand how a simple bad habit like dropping something out the car window can lead to a multimillion dollar environmental headache.”

The exact figure is $30 million annually, he said. And if it weren’t for the 2,700 participating volunteer groups statewide--involving nearly 30,000 people--the cost to taxpayers would be $17 million more, Carhart said.

Couches, appliances, even pictures for the walls seem to fall off trucks hereabouts. Carhart said 100,000 such items end up on state roadsides annually. One category of throwaways would seem to defy both reason and recycling. Carhart said women’s lingerie appears all the time. “I won’t venture a theory why,” he said.

Carhart said Caltrans is trying a recycling program on a demonstration basis in San Diego County.

Aluminum cans are supposed to be separated by the volunteers and put into marked bags, according to J.T. Noel, district Adopt-a-Highway coordinator. But an informal survey of the volunteer groups revealed that only a few have begun to separate cans at the pick-up sites along the roadside.

However, most of the orange plastic bags that are left for Caltrans to pick up are filled with paper, Carhart said. Broken glass, batteries and animal carcasses are left for professional crews to handle.

One group, Dads Against Drinking and Driving, has a special sensitivity to the issue of beverage containers, and separates them regularly for donation to the recycling center in Escondido.

“We find over a case of beer empties every time we go out,” said Joe Ingorvaia, the program’s founder. “This may not be a big statistic for you as an environmental person. But if you think that we get that every two weeks on just 2 miles of I-15 roadside in North County--when you think of all of California, that’s a lot of drinking drivers.”

The range of organizations involved around North County is considerable: Service clubs, businesses, schools and churches, U.S. Navy divers, even Harley Davidson clubs. The Western Sunbathing Assn., a Riverside County nudist group, also works to keep roadways clean, but wear regulation Caltrans gear--sturdy long pants, heavy shirts, safety vests, goggles and white hard hats.

A final news item on the bags those hardy environmental clean-up volunteers use. Later this year, Caltrans is going to give the Lions, Lionesses and their fellow volunteers statewide a further means of distinguishing themselves from probation clean-up crews. White bags will be issued to the “good guys.”

If your group or company wants to get on the list for the Adopt-a-Highway program in North County, call 688-3367.

Participation requires a 2-year commitment to collect trash four times a year or as needed, which is usually more frequently. Each group gets two signs, installed on opposite sides of the highway, to mark the beginning and end of its turf. One-third of Caltrans controlled highways have been adopted, another third is being evaluated for inclusion into the program, and the remaining third is considered too remote and not suitable for volunteer workers.