Tom Northey will be the first to tell you that he has a passion for litter.
But let’s be clear: The Oak Park resident’s passion focuses on removal, not distribution.
“Litter has been the bane of my existence since I was a little kid,” Northey said. “My dad would take us for a walk and I’d come back with an armful of trash. This was the 1960s (and I thought) how does this happen? How do you address this?”
As he got into his late high school and early college years, he became familiar with the broken window theory.
“It says, if you let broken windows and graffiti and litter exist, that’s where other antisocial behaviors start,” he said. “Take care of the little stuff and it will take care of the big stuff.
“Everybody is looking to solve big issues, but what if we solved the little things?”
For residents of a certain age, the commercials for Keep America Beautiful, with the tearful indigenous American, also had a profound effect on him, and he’s kept all of those things close to his heart for decades.
Now, he’s a driving force locally for Keep Oak Park Beautiful, an extension of Keep America Beautiful and an umbrella program for the village for four efforts: the Neighborhood Clean-Up, Adopt a Block, Green Block Party and Graffiti Reporting and Removal.
According to Christina Waters, Oak Park’s village clerk, these efforts are specific to various areas of the village. For example, in Adopt a Block, residents and business owners work together to keep their chosen adopted block clean. For Neighborhood Clean-Up, Northey’s prime focus, the village provides black plastic bags for garbage and clear plastic bags for recyclables, litter pickers, gloves and pink refuse stickers for groups that meet the first Saturday of every month from April to October.
The April event culled 25 volunteers to pick up litter along Madison Street from Lombard Avenue to Home Avenue from 8:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
The results speak for themselves – 200 pounds of garbage were removed.
“When we started on Lombard, there was a lot of little garbage; hundreds of Glide floss things with the handles,” Northey offered as an example. “Cigarettes, gum … I spent two hours pulling garbage out of the shrubbery at the CVS on Ridgeland and Madison.”
The May 2 event will clean up the area around the Harrison Street Arts District. The meeting location is still TBD; Northey is working that detail out with Publican Quality Bread at 211 Harrison St. Registration is easy; go to https://www.oak-park.us/Events-directory/Neighborhood-Clean-Up-Days on the village website.
Waters said cleanup is not limited to the first Saturday of each month. A group of local Girl Scouts contacted her to organize a cleanup day April 12. Those girls picked up 15 pounds of trash in one hour.
A key point that Waters and Northey both made is that Keep Oak Park Beautiful brings residents and businesses together.
“I really like cleaning,” she said. “So I really do appreciate, you see the mess and then you go out and then it is gone. It means a lot; we value the community. It brings people together in a fundamental way. We don’t have to talk about politics, we’re there for a common goal.”
Another point of all this as well is to encourage Oak Parkers to the right things on the front end when it comes to garbage and recyclables and consider the long-term consequences.
“That gum is never going to disintegrate,” he said. “Put it in a receptacle.”