Illegal trash dumping has always been a problem along the Allegheny River in Lower Burrell’s Braeburn neighborhood, said Wade Schantz, a resident who adopted a stretch of Lowe Road.
The past week has been no exception, with large piles of abandoned furniture and scattered waste along the road, accumulating mostly on the gravel pulloffs, where fishermen often park.
“It’s just a remote area that not too many people are passing — people just think that it’s somewhere that they can dump stuff,” Schantz said.
Braeburn resident Melinda Chapman said she has noticed trash accumulation getting worse in the past few months.
Chapman, who remembers playing by a clean river as a kid, is now wary of letting her teenage son fish along the Lowe Road stretch because she’s not sure what is in the bags of trash left behind.
“It isn’t the same anymore,” Chapman said. “It’s unsafe. It’s disgusting.”
Schantz said that for about a decade, he, along with a crew of friends and family, have cleaned up refuse by the river a few times a year, though he wasn’t able to last year because of a personal health issue.
He adopted the road in 2019 through PennDOT, which provides cleanup supplies and will pick up the collected trash with their trucks.
“It’s all volunteer until it’s in a pile, and then once we have a big pile of trash, they come and scoop it up for us,” Schantz said.
The garbage along Lowe Road the past week was some of the worst Schantz has seen, he said.
In response, he is organizing a Braeburn river cleanup April 25 and is seeking community volunteers. The cleanup starts at 10 a.m., and interested volunteers can message Schantz on Facebook.
“I’m trying to keep trash out of the river,” he said.”Every piece of trash I pick up is one less piece of trash that’ll end up in the ocean.”
Many of the areas being used for illegal dumping are private property, some of which belong to Electralloy, parent company of Braeburn Alloy Steel, which has a plant complex along the road.
Lower Burrell City Manager Greg Primm said Braeburn Steel is stepping in to clean up the furniture left behind.
He said it would also be installing trash cans.
While trash dumping is illegal and carries fines ranging from $50 to several thousand dollars depending on offense severity and repetition, Primm said it is difficult to enforce punitive measures because of scant evidence.
Unless there is a witness or police can find identifying documents in the trash, it’s hard to identify litterers because trail camera footage is often not high enough quality, Primm said.
He said the city wants residents to report illegal dumping.
“We always share residents’ concerns,” he said.
Schantz said he hopes the added trash cans will help and that Braeburn Steel empties them regularly.
He said he has thought about putting in trash cans before but didn’t because he was worried it would invite more garbage.
“That might give people incentive to go down there and dump more stuff, because they’ll see that and think ‘oh, well, they’re gonna get rid of it anyways,” Schantz said.
Chapman, the Braeburn resident, said she finds the littering disrespectful to Braeburn residents.
“It makes people also think the people in Braeburn aren’t worth anything,” she said.