|
Spring is the season when Charlotte's relationship with its public spaces becomes most visible. Volunteers fan out across Uptown for Earth Day. Pollinator gardens come back to life. New litter data lands on the table. Taken together, the past few weeks tell a clear story: Charlotte has a strong foundation to build on, but staying cleaner, greener and more resilient depends on residents, volunteers, partners and city teams pulling in the same direction.
|
| |
|
A clearer picture of Charlotte's litter problem
|
| |
|
Over the course of a year, Keep Charlotte Beautiful (KCB), a program within Housing & Neighborhood Services, sent volunteers to 250 randomly selected road segments four times each to count what they found. The results are now in.
|
| |
|
Charlotte averages about four pieces of roadside litter per resident. That may sound small, but it still adds up: roughly 3.7 million pieces of roadside litter sit on Charlotte streets on any given day. The five most common items, in order, are cigarettes, miscellaneous plastic, miscellaneous paper, plastic food wrappers, and plastic bottles. A full dashboard of the study results is available online. The local findings arrive alongside new national data from Keep America Beautiful, which shows litter along America's roadways and surface waterways declined by 34% from 2020 to 2025. Still, the national study estimates that about 35 billion pieces of litter remain across roadways, waterways and coastal areas on any given day.
|
| |
|
For KCB Executive Director Jonathan Hill, the local takeaway is striking in its simplicity: if every Charlotte resident picked up just four pieces of litter, there would effectively be no litter left on the city's streets.
|
| |
 |
| |
|
Clean the Queen's biggest year yet
|
| |
|
That math came to life on Earth Day, April 22, when Clean the Queen wrapped up its fifth year with a new twist: a citywide cleanup focused entirely on Uptown. More than 100 volunteers gathered on the Duke Energy plaza before fanning out across Center City, and the full week drew more than 45 companies and close to 800 volunteer signups, making it the largest year in the program's history.
|
| |
|
This year's Uptown edition brought Duke Energy Foundation and Charlotte Center City Partners alongside longtime partners Envision Charlotte, Keep Charlotte Beautiful, and Charlotte Solid Waste Services. Duke Energy Foundation President Loree Elswick said the event gave employees and partners a chance to invest time in the place where so many Charlotte residents work and gather. Jalitha Jarrett of Charlotte Center City Partners framed it as stewardship: Uptown is stronger when the people and organizations based there help take ownership of its public spaces.
|
| |
|
Final week totals: 619 volunteers, 1,547 hours served, 564 bags of trash, and 55 bags of recycling collected.
|
| |
 |
| |
|
From Spring Break to Earth Month: planting Charlotte's next pollinator habitats
|
| |
|
Earth Day didn't start the conversation; it built on weeks of earlier work. KCB kicked off Earth Month by partnering with three Charlotte-Mecklenburg elementary schools during spring break, planting pollinator habitats at Albemarle Road Elementary (April 8), Newell Elementary (April 9), and Piney Grove Elementary (April 10).
|
| |
|
The school plantings serve a dual purpose: they create new habitat for native pollinators, and they give K–5 students a living, on-campus example of the waste reduction and environmental stewardship lessons KCB delivers in partnership with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
|
| |
|
Going beyond cleanup: register your own pollinator habitat
|
| |
|
Cleaner streets are one piece of a healthier city. Greener yards are another. Thanks to community advocacy, Charlotte City Council has allowed registered pollinator habitats and naturalistic landscapes to be exempt from the city's nuisance vegetation ordinance.
|
| |
|
HNS is now actively sharing information about the city's free pollinator habitat and naturalistic landscape registration program. Property owners with qualifying, well-maintained habitats may be eligible to register and, once approved, qualify for the ordinance exemption. Naturalistic landscapes are also a low-water alternative to traditional turf, an especially relevant point as Charlotte enters its drought response period.
|
| |
|
Residents can learn more and register at cltgov.me/habitatreg. Community partners can request the outreach toolkit to help spread the word.
|
| |
|
Watch the video to see how one Charlotte resident turned his yard into a registered pollinator habitat.
|
| |
 |
| |
|
The everyday work behind the headlines
|
| |
|
Volunteer events make a visible difference, but they're a fraction of the year-round effort. Eric DeLaPena, Deputy Director of Operations for Charlotte Solid Waste Services (SWS), said city crews collected more than 7,000 tons of trash and debris over the past year. Volunteer events "force multiply" that work, he said, but they also remind everyone that city staff cannot solve the problem alone.
|
| |
|
A few of the teams keeping Charlotte clean every day:
|
| |
| • |
Solid Waste Services runs 12 daily cleanup routes, services 60 urban-core routes every two weeks and 90 major-corridor routes quarterly, sweeps roughly 12,000 miles of streets annually, and maintains 500 public trash cans. Residents can text their collection day to 73224 for English alerts, or "Jueves," "Lunes," etc. for Spanish. |
| • |
Keep Charlotte Beautiful logged over 11,000 volunteer hours and 5,500 bags of litter collected in 2024, and partners with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to teach K–5 students about waste reduction. |
| • |
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services mobilized more than 4,800 volunteers in FY 2025, who collected over 67,000 pounds of litter and marked more than 1,500 storm drains with educational decals. |
| • |
The Office of Sustainability and Resilience integrates waste reduction and diversion into the city's Strategic Energy Action Plan Plus (SEAP+), the roadmap for Charlotte's climate and energy goals. |
| • |
Landscape Management maintains over 1,000 medians and 300 acres of green space, plus 600 acres of vacant property that sometimes face illegal dumping. Crews clear litter before any mowing or trimming. |
|
| |
|
How to get involved
|
| |
|
The energy from Earth Day only matters if it carries into ordinary days. A few ways to plug in:
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
Pick four pieces today. Multiply that across 900,000+ residents, and the math takes care of itself.
|
| |
|
|
| |
