01/02/2024
Hello to All!
Clean For Anew LLC will make changes this year in our attempt to spotlight the public health disparities focusing on neighborhood blight (loose litter, discarded trash, and empty houses for rent and sale) as well as assessing the community health and quality of life in low-income or poverty-stricken neighborhood.
This work will expand to other areas of the urban landscape but for this year we will focus on the low income and poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Lansing, MI.
Over the last year, I have seen different organizations start to pool resources and concentrate on the loose litter and discarded trash that is situated in areas of consumerism, around shopping malls, main roads in the city that are lined with businesses, and low-income neighborhoods, that have many people living in poverty, as well as along highways and natural areas or urban forests throughout the City of Lansing.
This effort is applauded and recognized, it is essential that we start the removal of litter and discarded trash from our environment but caring about the trees, river, and plants before we care about another human being takes us back to when people held no value, instead of a time that everyone holds value because they are alive and a human being.
The next evolution of all environmental organizations is to start and work with other organizations that interact and work with underserved people that are directly affected by discarded trash and litter in their everyday lives.
Many underserved people feel the effects of litter and discarded trash at a greater rate, but trash does not discriminate. All people are affected by the psychological and situational factors that are created by living in, passing through or visiting areas of extreme neighborhood litter and discarded trash.
For people living in within neighborhood blight, these terrible circumstances coupled with the psychological and situational factors can inhibit a person’s ability to properly discard waste using private or public sanitation services.
Those people, the homeless, poverty-stricken families, people who have grown up becoming accustomed to the proliferation of litter and discarded trash, they are people who will make waste just as we all do.
The question should be: How do we process and help these people to eliminate their waste in a sustainable and humanistic way that is not engrained in capitalism but embedded within love?
As the movement to understand the effects of discarded trash and litter are in fact a public health and mental health concern, Clean For Anew LLC will continue to gather as much data and research as we can about why trash is ignored by community members and the local municipalities in certain areas, such as shopping malls, areas of mass consumerism (commercial areas), low-income and poverty stricken areas when compared to the cleanliness and neighborhood vitality in areas of wealth, higher house values and higher income jobs or to speak frankly, areas that have people who are financially stable and secure.
Hopefully this effort towards change, an effort mixed with social science, social justice, and public health will add onto the much-needed attention towards the amount of litter and discarded trash that is rampant throughout the City of Lansing and around the state of Michigan.