A faster way to pick up litter
It used to be, prisoners, highway workers and volunteers got stuck picking up the soda cans and fast food wrappers along highways. This spring the Missouri Department of Transportation has begun using a litter-picking machine to pluck up trash.
The Barber Litter Picker attaches to a tractor and uses a rake system to remove junk from roadsides. What kind of junk? You name it: cardboard, road kill, paper, wood, cans, tire tread, etc. It can cover eight acres an hour. In eight minutes, it picks up as much trash as three people can collect in an hour. The contraption can hold 50 bags of trash.
Does this mean we’ll see less trash this summer? Possibly. It depends how often the department uses this machine, and how quickly drivers clutter up litter-free roadsides with more debris. The volunteers, prisoners and highway workers will still be needed though. There aren’t enough of these litter-picking machines to canvass the whole state.
So, we spent who knows how much money on this thing instead of using the free labor that the prison system provides to pick up trash. We are paying for three hots and a cot for these prisoners whether they pick up trash or not…
Of course, if people would stop throwing crap out their car window this would be a moot point.
I wonder how long it will be before some endangered mouse or tick gets picked up by this thing and then the environmentalists start having a fit over it…
………..I agree that the prisoners who can be trusted with outside-the-jailhouse work should keep doing the litter pickup. It keeps them busy doing something positive, and I’d feel pretty sure they don’t mind being outside the confines of the jailhouse for the day.