Thanks for point out this issue. One point of clarification. The wire basket trash cans placed around the neighborhood were made available through a partnership between the Passyunk Square Civic Association and the Passyunk Avenue Revitalization Corporation (PARC) - not the city. PARC has agreed to empty the cans every work day in the course of their other street cleaning activities. Without that arrangement, these cans would be impossible to maintain and service and would not have been placed. These cans were placed in high traffic areas near bus stops and other places to give people a place to discard common litter items like plastic bottles, candy wrappers, chip bags, cheesesteak wrappers, napkins, discarded lottery tickets, etc.

Unfortunately, commenter Beeg is correct. Too many people are using too many of the cans for their household trash, often bagged up in loosely tied plastic shopping bag which quickly fill the cans. The result, as you can probably see today, is that after just two days without a pick-up (weekends) and especially after three such days (like this weekend with a holiday on Monday) the overflow. We assure you, though, that they are scheduled to be emptied every non-holiday weekday.

The Passyunk Square Civic Association has been dealing with this as it comes up and has responded to specific neighbor requests to remove cans from certain locations and redeploy them to others where they would more likely be used for litter rather than household trash. We're also considering several options for securing the cans to make them less easily used for large trash (similar to Beeg's suggestion).

For the most part we've gotten good feedback that the cans have cut down on street litter. If we can get control of the household dumping issue - with a different design, enforcement or continued outreach to people who might not realize that it's inappropriate to use the cans for this purpose - we'll have a pretty good asset for the neighborhood.

Until then, please continue to report cases of overflowing cans so we can get that to PARC. (They'll be out there again tomorrow... emptying the cans.) Thanks!

To the PSCA,

Thank you for taking initiative on this issue. I appreciate all your efforts and progress in curbing the litter problem. It does not go unnoticed.

Thanks, Beeg. And thanks for doing your part (actually MORE than your part) at 8th and Federal!

Why Isn't the City taking care of this? It should not be the responsibility of the civic association to put cans up. Why aren't we holding the city responsible for this?