Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Danielle Crumrine of Pittsburgh Clean Ways looks over garbage dumped on Irwin Street on the North Side. Crumrine says the city has a tough time enforcing regulations to control dumpsites like these. Click photo for larger image.

Small armies in neighborhoods as dissimilar as Shadyside and Perry Hilltop have sparked a citywide surge in fighting what many call an epidemic of litter. City Council's response late last month was to create and fund the Clean Pittsburgh Commission.

By the end of next month, the 15-seat commission should have its six at-large members in place, said Dave Mazza of the Pennsylvania Resources Council, the commission's point man. "We want to be the connection between the everyday city resident and the city," he said.

Clean Pittsburgh will be a clearinghouse of neighborhood efforts, linking groups and helping them be more effective by sharing ideas, providing supplies -- brooms, gloves, pick-up implements and bags -- and pressing assertively for enforcement, said Mazza.

Litter is the most preventable and pervasive insult to a city's quality of life, yet where it is most prevalent -- in poorer and transitional neighborhoods -- bigger problems hold sway. But litter is a signal of apathy, and apathy is a threat, said District 5 Councilman Doug Shields, citing the "broken-windows theory" that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book "The Tipping Point." The theory of criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling holds that "crime is the inevitable result of disorder," Gladwell writes. "If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread..."

Danielle Crumrine, co-founder of Pennsylvania CleanWays of Allegheny County, pointed out one example of spreading crime along Irwin Avenue just past the Columbus Middle School on the North Side recently. Irwin quickly becomes a quiet, wooded lane after the Charles Street turn-off.

	Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Tom Wilson, right, of the Perry Hilltop Citizens Council, helps remove weeds and trash at the corner of Chester and Burgess last weekend on the North Side. Click photo for larger image.

"This is classic small-contractor stuff," she said, lifting an appliance box from a wet couch along the side of the road. Bags of garbage lay among pieces from a stove top, sinks, moulding and wallpaper, light fixtures, chairs, drawers, flower pots and landscaping debris. "Half of this stuff could have been taken to Construction Junction."

Crumrine, a 27-year-old North Sider, said a plethora of illegal dumps in poor neighborhoods pose environmental justice issues.

Many contractors take people's money to illegally dump household waste, she said. "Always get a receipt to protect yourself" in case trash is traced back to you.

On Aug. 6, Crumrine initiated what she calls First Saturdays with a dozen volunteers who spent hours clearing weeds and litter on Perry Hilltop. Her goal is to mobilize clean-up crews on the first Saturday of every month. She and five volunteers uncovered sidewalks that had vanished under weeds where Chester Avenue meets Burgess Street. Behind the weeds, enough trash had collected to fill 25 lawn-and-leaf bags.

In a survey that CleanWays took in Perry Hilltop two years ago, cleanliness fell short of both jobs and safety as priorities.

"The challenge is to make people see that the third thing relates to the other two," she said. Kids ask why they should care, she said.

It appears many of their elders know the answer.

Mazza said nearly every neighborhood has some kind of activity against litter. (See contact information at the end of the story.) Some examples are:

The South Side Slopes Association has held six weekend clean-ups this summer. One was to clear an illegal dump from South Side Park. On Sept. 17, the group's call to arms "Tire Toss," a neighborhood event to clear the ravine off Brosville Street of about 1,000 tires, said Bev Boggio, president of the association.

Bruce A. Kraus of the South Side and president of the South Side Chamber of Commerce, helped organize a Trash Bash last May with 220 volunteers and wants to sustain that effort.

The Central North Side anti-litter committee, Crumrine's second First Saturday club, debuted over the weekend with an inventory of litter hot spots, said John Engle, the committee chairman. After Saturday's inspection tour, the group will start regular sweeps on the first Saturday of each month.

On Mount Washington, where new trash receptacles will include components for recycling, a group of cleanup enthusiasts is organizing as "the Green Team."

Probably the most dogged of all has been 73-year-old Boris Weinstein, a retired public relations executive whose organization of volunteers in Shadyside is a model for the commission's outreach, said Mazza. Weinstein is an apostle, and as passionate as he is, everything he says is positive, with an exclamation mark.

He attracted 19 volunteers after writing an op-ed piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in March. He built a crew of 24 until last week, when, at a sidewalk sale on Walnut Street, he signed up 55 more, some from Squirrel Hill. Weinstein assigns his volunteers convenient routes and reports on their progress in his monthly 'Newslitter'. He keeps and updates a list of sites he calls "garbagevilles."

"I get a kick out of clean," he said. "I'm so excited. This is working."

Weinstein authored the slogan "For Pete's Sake" on city trash cans in the 1970s for Mayor Pete Flaherty. He has tried to get a anti-litter movement going citywide for 20 years, he said, "then it finally clicked in my head: Make it work in a small area."

He said funding is overrated: "I get extra bags at the grocery store. I spent $20 on a picker-upper. That's it." His primary route is Walnut to Ellsworth and all the streets in between from Aiken to Negley, but he walks other areas, too, especially where volunteers are lacking.

On his route, he wears a delighted grin as he zig-zags along his streets, dipping the picker-upper into shrubbery, under Dumpsters, even grabbing the most glaring cigarette butts, which, he admits he mostly ignores because "they really slow you down."

People on sidewalks, on porches and in cars call to him.

"Isn't this fun?" he asked one morning as we finished cleaning around and under a dumpster that was buzzing with flies.

He believes his effort is cumulative, that if you keep at it you begin to "un-tip" the epidemic. "See how clean that alley is?" he said. "Look up that street. No litter. Isn't that great?

"I'm having a ball, making progress, setting an example, and I know other people are doing it, too."

His enthusiasm infected 25-year-old Jake Krohn, who last March committed to a Shadyside route near his home in Bloomfield. A Web developer at Carnegie Mellon University, Krohn's a gangly North Dakota native who said he and his wife have "gotten wrapped up in Pittsburgh." He makes his rounds one or two evenings a week. "I care about cities in general," he said. "I'll do what I can to help them win."

One evening on his route along Centre Avenue, he was bobbing up and down every few seconds to grab handfuls of cups, cans, bottles, newspaper, fliers and junk-food wrappers. "This is incredible," he said. "And this is a 'good' neighborhood."

Shields said the grass-roots efforts are "fabulous," but they face a challenge in his hometown: "The city I grew up in, and I'm 52, was about work, not aesthetics. It has never focused on the little things that add up to a better quality of life. The culture has to change."

Mazza said police need the administration's support to go after litterers because of public criticism -- i.e., "Don't they have more important things to do?" -- when police do crack down. Police made 175 citations for litter last year, he said, but during the administration's 2002-03 "De-bug de Burgh" campaign, they wrote 400 in six months. "It will be the commission's job to make sure the ordinance is enforced."

The commission will be paid for in part by an increase from $15 to $25 in the littering fine, getting the extra $10. It will also get any amount that exceeds the city's projections of how much it will earn in state performance grants. The grants go up the more the city recycles.

Much of what ends up as litter can be recycled, and the more trash removed from the waste stream, the less the taxpayer has to pay. The city offsets its landfill bill by the recyclables it sells, said Shields. "If you're ready to tell me how bad your taxes are, I say take control in your own small way."

To reach Dave Mazza of the Clean Pittsburgh Commission, call 412-488-7490, Ext. 209; Danielle Crumrine of Pa CleanWays, 412-381-1301; Boris Weinstein, 412-688-9120; Bev Boggio of the South Side Slopes Association, 412-488-0486.