“What do you want for Christmas?”

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving this year, I began to hear this familiar question from my family. (Sadly, “a plastic-free ocean” wouldn’t fit on my wish list.) Like millions of Americans, my relatives were looking to snag some deals over the Black Friday weekend. Though I will also be wrapping some presents for family this year, I decided to skip shopping in the days following Thanksgiving, opting instead to get outdoors and clean up a local park.

As Black Friday discounts spread around the globe and American shoppers are spending more on this day every year, the environmental impact of our purchasing habits is adding up. 

The online and in-store shopping spike between Black Friday and Cyber Monday means more delivery trucks on roads and freight ships crossing oceans. This creates a worldwide surge in air pollution concentrated over just a few days. Our discounted goods have companions, too: packing peanuts, plastic shopping bags, and other packaging pile up on this shopping holiday, and are all but doomed for the landfill. The heavily-discounted items we buy over this weekend, such as new technology and clothing, are no different. Globally, 50 million tons of electronics waste is produced annually, and Americans are throwing away clothes at a rate of 13 million tons per year.

Some organizations have begun a push to boycott Black Friday. 

The international environmentalist group Greenpeace endorses Buy Nothing Day, a sort of anti-holiday that originated in Australia in 1997. Participants observe the day, which commonly takes place on or around Black Friday, by abstaining from making any purchases for 24 hours. 

REI, the outdoor recreation company, promotes a similar approach. Starting in 2015, REI began closing its stores (and shutting down its website) on Black Friday, encouraging employees and customers to instead spend the day outdoors. The company created the social media hashtag #OptOutside to promote the initiative, which this year became part of a larger climate action campaign. Starting with the coordination of over 100 litter cleanup events around Black Friday, REI marked November 2019 as the kickoff of its “Opt to Act Plan.” This free-to-use plan provides participants with 52 simple weekly challenges intended to reduce one’s environmental impact. 

The day after Thanksgiving, I recruited my friend Marcus McCleary to join me in cleaning up Constitution Lakes, a nature preserve tucked behind a truck dealership off a busy industrial boulevard in Southeast Atlanta.  

(Street view courtesy of Google Maps) Visitors to this unique park may take the boardwalks over two small, minnow-filled lakes and can also stroll along the Doll’s Head Trail, a short hiking loop featuring folk art sculptures made of found objects scattered throughout the park. Marcus is a regular contributor to these sculptures himself. 

We set out with our gloves and bags, often having to tread through twigs and briars to pick up litter off the sides of the walking paths. Among our discoveries were plenty of weathered beer cans and heavily-soiled soda bottles, some even with moss growing inside them. Along the banks of the lakes, we found lots of styrofoam cups and plastic wraps, some too far out in the water for us to reach. 

I have written about the consequences of littering before, but I was reminded of an additional one during this cleanup: Tossing trash in nature can ruin perfectly good recyclables. Our first bag of litter included numerous bottles that were simply too filthy to clean for recycling. 

In addition to the usual offenders (food wrappers, tobacco products, etc.), here are some of the more unique items we found during our cleanup:

A dilapidated bouncy ball.

A box of condoms.

Tangles of fishing wire.

A THC cartridge.

Underwear hung from trees.

A glass Coca-Cola bottle from 1979.

An antique iron doorknob (Marcus added this to a Doll’s Head sculpture).

Several of the objects Marcus and I found had obviously been discarded decades in the past. This made me think about how long items littered today will lay in waiting before someone comes along to clean them up. 

Here is the final haul of litter we carried out of the park, not including the first bag we tossed halfway through:

We ended up collecting a respectable pile of bottles and cans for recycling: