Philadelphia has a special relationship with trash. The city's sanitation department is paid better than its police department or its firefighters, yet the city is covered in trash. Everywhere you go, trash crosses the street back and forth all day like Northeastern tumbleweeds. It's disgusting and embarrassing.

The city has created programs like the Community Partnership Program to deal with this, but they are outmatched and unknown. The Community Partnership Program was created so that anyone who wanted to clean up their neighborhood could. They provide volunteers with garbage bags, gloves, and other tools. Once the trash is bagged up they send a truck to your designated pick up site. Unfortunately this great program is buried in a warehouse over on American Street. It is a small operation, and as helpful as it is it still isn't enough to deal with the monumental trash problem in Philly.

The trash problem isn't so simple as people being lazy. The construction companies however, would love for you to think that. That is why when they dump massive amounts of concrete, brick, wood, sheet rock, insulation, and other hazardous materials in the middle of neighborhoods where people's kids play they stuff these things into black garbage bags; to hid their crime.

Everyone knows about it, but no one does anything about it. This is why 20th century muckraking Journalist Lincoln Steffens called this city corrupt and contented in his book The Shame of the Cities. The cops drive by without issuing fines because this issue is firmly planted at the bottom of the priority list for city politicians. The construction companies save money on labor, time, and transportation costs. The neighbors shrug indifferently, because after all, this is Philadelphia. It is illegal however, and there are laws in place to prosecute construction companies that illegally dump their materials.

The hard part is proving which construction company put the trash there, but it shouldn't be so. When there is a house on a street, and then one day that house isn't there anymore, but now there is a huge pile of former house across the street it is not hard to figure out where it came from. When a house with a basement is built, and all the sudden there's a basement worth of dirt across the street we know who did it.

The standard law is that you have to catch them in the act of dumping, but I have a hard time believing that a police officer would stop a construction worker carrying trash across the street to throw on someone else's lot. The other standard is the address law. If in the massive pile of trash you find something addressed to the house that was torn down (an envelope for example), it is considered proof, but the construction companies know that, so they don't make that mistake.

A lot of people in positions of authority are willing to let this go on, but as long as thee construction companies are dumping illegally the rest of Philadelphia will dump their trash illegally. And the only way to stop it is to prosecute. The construction companies will complain, but they aren't doing this because they can't afford to dispose of their waste.

They are doing this because we let them and it makes their profit margin greater. They will never stop until the city fines or prosecutes them, and nothing will ever change until they stop. Until then we might as well get used to walking through piles of trash on the sidewalk everyday.