Pick Up Your Trash: Chatsworth Volunteers Line Topanga Canyon

CHATSWORTH, CA — Chatsworth volunteers hit the West Valley streets Friday with bright yellow signs that read "please don't litter our streets," encouraging their neighbors to help keep the Valley clean.

The volunteers lined Topanga Canyon Boulevard from the State Route 118 (Ronald Reagan Freeway) to Ventura Boulevard — a distance of nearly eight miles — at every stoplight. The day included about 40 volunteers, said Jill Mather, founder of the Chatsworth-based nonprofit Volunteers Cleaning Communities.

"[Littering] become an absolutely insane problem. The city just can't do it on their own. The community has to get involved and help out. It's our community. A community's like a family, you always help your family. So people need to get out and help their community," Mather said.

The group can normally be found picking up trash in yellow vests, but this week they decided to step up their messaging.

"It was really a friendly callout to the community," Mather said. She added: "I'm always trying to think of interesting things to get people involved."

The event was a huge success, Mather said, as motorists passing by honked and gave the volunteers thumbs up. Mather has already seen repeat volunteers from Friday's event.

Littering has become a bigger issue in the San Fernando Valley in recent years, Mather said, which she attributes to increasing homelessness in California, lifestyle changes due to the pandemic and civic anger.

The population of people experiencing homelessness has been increasing for years in California, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Encampments often create a lot of litter, Mather said. She and her volunteers with work individuals experiencing homelessness to help clean up encampments.

"I'm not going to blame it on the unhoused, but there's a huge amount of trash from the unhoused," Mather said.

Additionally, the pandemic has led to a massive increase in single-use materials that often ends up as litter, such as masks and to-go food containers. The pandemic has also caused a certain fatigue for citizens, Mather said, contributing to apathy about the environmental impact of litter and trash. Frustration with the city's failure to address littering and trash caused by encampments also contributes to this apathy, Mather said.

"The general public has gotten very apathetic to trash because they see so much of [the] kind of trash that angers them. And so they say, I'm guessing, 'why should I worry about trash when the city is not worrying about it?'" she said. She added: "People have just gotten lazy about it, they just don't care."

Mather's organization will be holding another sign holding event on Tampa Avenue on Dec. 3, and plans to do a different major street every month.

"There are the people like myself or my volunteers who already have the mentality that it's wrong. I personally do not want a trash-heap world for my grandkids or my kids or anybody, and it will be that," Mather said.