How much trash is scattered along South End’s rail trail? At least 2,100 gallons, anyway

It’s 6 a.m. on a Saturday, and Paul Neumann has just begun his day near a light rail stop, with two 30-gallon garbage bags clenched in his right hand.

The first bag is for recycled products, the other for everything else. In a parking lot at the corner of Bland and College streets, he puts on a pair of gloves and picks up his “garbage picker upper scooper,” the technical term, he said with a laugh.

He’s about to begin a roughly four-and-a-half mile trek down the Charlotte Rail Trail and back. By the time he’s home, both bags will be filled with the discarded trash along the light rail line that parallels South Boulevard through the South End.

Every Saturday and Sunday, Neumann walks this same path, with his garbage bags, picking up just about everything scattered through the area, including beer cans, liquor bottles and used cups. But he draws the line at cigarette butts and dog poop, he said.

Sometimes he’s found more interesting things, like two driver’s licenses he mailed back to their owners. Since the pandemic, he’s seen an increase in discarded masks and disposable gloves.

When Neumann is out of town and can’t be there to pick up the trash, he feels guilty leaving it there.

It all started as a “distraction” from his main hobbies.

Originally from Rochester, New York, Neumann travels the world to climb mountains. He began running in 2003 as a way to train to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro the following year.

He moved to Charlotte in 2014, where he met friends who kept him running to train for marathons and other races. He now lives in the South End, near the light rail, and runs around the area almost daily.

Neumann started noticing plastic cups, beer bottles, liquor bottles, straw wrappers and other things lining the area around the light rail.

“It really upset me,” Neumann said.

He began picking trash up along his runs, but it wasn’t until October 2019 that he started bringing garbage bags with him.

“I don’t want to run where there’s garbage,” he said.

Neumann ran a marathon in Berlin in late September. While there, he decided to start cleaning up the light rail area as soon as he got back to Charlotte.

“I distinctly remember as I’m running, I’m like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I just got out here, grab some garbage bags and just picked up all this garbage and cleaned everything up?’” Neumann said.

Neumann knows which sections of the hedgerows that line the rail are likely to be stuffed with litter, and he can even predict what it’ll be. Usually, it’s cans of domestic beers or hard seltzers and leftover boxes and bags from fast food meals.

“They just throw the cans on the tracks … that takes effort to do that ... it’s a conscious decision to take your can and throw it over the fence on the tracks,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

For a while, his trash collection was a secret shared only with the people who passed him along the trail.

“People are terrible, aren’t they?” a woman asked as she walked past Neumann throwing trash into one of his bags. “It’s not that hard.”

She thanked him for what he was doing. Neumann said that’s common.

He’s been scolded only a few times, when people have told him to leave it up to cleaning crews.

Since he started, Neumann estimates he’s collected between 70 and 75 30-gallon bags of trash.

He runs between four and six days a week as part of his marathon training. Only Saturdays and Sundays are exclusively dedicated to collecting trash, but he admits that all of his runs aren’t “just runs now.”

Neumann recognizes this can’t go on forever. Even though the coronavirus bought him some extra time to catch up on picking up the litter, it seems never-ending.

Neumann said he has inspired one of his friends to bring a garbage bag with her on her runs as well. He laughed and warned her she didn’t know what she was getting into. When he started collecting garbage, he thought he’d just pick up what immediately crossed his path.

“Then it turned into all this,” he said. “And then you get obsessive about it because you can’t pick up some stuff and not all of it … Pretty soon just picking up a lot of trash is going to lead you into grass and that’s going to lead you into a parking lot.”

He’s thought about contacting the city about all the garbage he’s seen along the route, but he said he realized there is garbage everywhere; along the light rail path is just where he happens to run.

Neumann is scheduled to run several marathons in the fall, and training could take away from his garbage collection time. In October, once he’s collected trash for exactly a year, he’s going to stop the weekend ritual, but he’ll still pick things up as he runs.

Neumann considers himself an environmentalist and has been interested in those issues since his early 20s, he said. He thinks his travels across the world have broadened his perspective on environmental problems.

When he travels to second- and third-world countries to climb mountains, he sees garbage everywhere and wonders if he could move and dedicate his life to helping clean it up. But that might not be realistic, he said.

When he thinks of the problems facing the world, Neumann said, most don’t have an easy solution, but litter isn’t one of those things.

“Something like this is so simple,” Neumann said. “It’s not hard to just not litter.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 3:30 PM.