Seattle Public Utilities is out with its 2024 “Clean City” report as it says citizens are volunteering more effort than ever to community clean-ups while its totals for debris collected from the public right of way actually dropped during the year.
“I’m proud we’re doing this work. Keeping Seattle neighborhoods cleaner helps residents thrive,” SPU General Manager and CEO Andrew Lee said in the announcement. “We welcome more residents and community organizations to join us in supporting Seattle’s diverse communities.”
SPU says its crews removed 1,765,421 pounds of debris from 1,550 blocks across the city’s right-of-way in 2024, down 7% from 2023 despite continued increased use of the Find It, Fix It “Service Request Mobile App.”
SPU credits “community engagement and education, enforcement efforts, and collaboration with other City of Seattle departments” for the reduction.
The Find It, Fix It app is focused on issues around cleanliness and rubbish but stats from the show that a bulk of the system’s calls are related to homelessness even though the app’s categories don’t show choices like “encampment” or “tents.” Instead, the calls are frequently reported under general inquiries, or “illegal dumping,” the most frequently used category in Find It, Fix It complaints. UPDATE: In a 2022 update, the app began accepting requests for an “Unauthorized Encampment.” Users are asked to use the category to “Report an unauthorized encampment that includes tents or structures assembled for habitation.”
In addition to the service calls, SPU says it cleaned the right of way along “48 proactive routes” as well as conducting 634 “Geo Cleans, collecting 407,489 total pounds of trash and debris from RV sites along the right of way.” A separate RV-focused effort resulted in an additional 107 callouts collecting more than 580,000 more pounds of trash and debris collected.
SPU crews are getting a boost from volunteers. The city says Mayor Bruce Harrell’s One Seattle initiatives have helped drive more than a $1 million worth of volunteer hours cleaning up the city.
CHS reported here on other, smaller, but longer lasting efforts like the Caring for Capitol Hill group organizing neighborhood clean-ups around Cal Anderson Park. Others like Seattle Street Fixers are also trying to pick up what the city doesn’t get to. UPDATE: Both programs are supported by the city’s Adopt a Street resources.
SPU’s report also includes its work to provide and maintain city trash and recycling cans. SPU says it maintains 1,145 public litter and recycling cans across Seattle, in partnership with
Waste Management and Recology. “Service levels vary between 3 to 14 times per week, depending on location needs,” SPU says.
SPU says improved cans are also helping. “In 2024, we upgraded 100 older-style cans to key-locked cart-garage cans (standard graphics photo) in the neighborhoods of Belltown, Hillman City, First Hill, Greenwood/Phinney Ridge, and Magnolia. These new cans helped improve collection efficiency by addressing issues such as overflows, illegal dumping, and
scattered litter. Additionally, the key-locked cans installed in 2023 in the Chinatown-International District and Pioneer Square have significantly reduced instances of illegal dumping, vandalism, and overflow scatter throughout 2024.”
Its needle program, meanwhile, collected more than 800,000 sharps in 2024 across the city from 23 boxes including one on Capitol Hill at Cal Anderson Park’s restroom building . UPDATE: As originally written, this sentence read as if 800,000 sharps were collected at Cal Anderson. The park’s box is the source of around 2% of all the sharps collected in the city. Sorry for the confusion.
One area of keeping Seattle “clean” won’t involve SPU any longer. The city’s “Graffiti Rangers” are now organized under Seattle Parks and Recreation. The city says the work of the rangers jumped in 2024 with graffiti cleared from 1,091,204 square feet of public property, a 25% increase if you measure the removal by the foot. Find It, Fix It complaints about graffiti leapt 28%.
You can read the full 2024 report from SPU here (PDF).
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Might be nice to mention Hunters Capital. They are a big partner with Caring for Capitol Hill for monthly cleanups and you’ve used photos of their past and current employees in the referenced article and as the main photo for this article. They are a very active partner with these events and leading the charge for making the Capitol Hill neighborhood clean & safe!
Thanks for mentioning Hunters Capital, we’re so grateful for their partnership! They host every other month, bring out a bunch of volunteers with great energy (many of whom are staff and family), and are always thinking up fun ways to engage cleanups with the community and their residents 🙌🙌🙌
Hunters Capital is hosting the cleanup this Sunday, March 9th! We meet at the lobby of The Broadway Building (1641 Nagle Pl) at 10am for refreshments and cleanup on Nagle and in and around Cal Anderson until noon. Everyone is welcome to join 😀
I’m not wearing a yellow vest, but I do have a grabber.
Trump has a grabber.
SPU shouldn’t be taking a bow for keeping the city cleaner. Residents have had to step in where the city has failed. It shouldn’t be our job to cleanup after the thousands of drug vagrants milling about. Once upon a time before the city’s “progressive” policies made Seattle a mecca for drug addicts, this was a very clean city.
So over it you havent found a better state to be client of, classic
This is exactly how many conservative economists think, that government services should be treated as commodities and people will collectively move to optimize the services they want/need. Such an insanely harmful theory that creates a race to the bottom.
Government isn’t for the people, it’s an extension of the people, this notion that it owes you a clean city without action on your end is wild. Being part of a community involves active participation and care for that community. The capitalist system has convinced people that government is failing them, but don’t expect things to improve or get any cheaper as we continue or national experiment with privatization of government services.
It’s possible to both ask better of our government and do better as residents within our community, in fact, it’s really the only way we progress as a society.
The privatization that we’ve seen in Seattle is less about “capitalism” and more about outsourcing resources and expertise to nonprofits. This is a massive mistake regardless of where you may sit on America’s current left/right divide. Depriving government of gaining expertise destroys the quality of public services.
It’s more about exporting blame and liability, than resources and expertise… but it’s definitely still mostly about capitalism. Many of the nonprofits are like shell corporations with board members from for profit groups who often run them in ways that promote or uphold capitalist systems.
Eh I’m not convinced that the proliferation of nonprofits to do all government work is somehow a product of capitalism. Most of the folks at those nonprofits I’ve met are very much of the “down with capitalism” groups.
Way to show a complete misunderstanding of the system you’re talking about. Sure, most of the folks at those nonprofits are not hyper capitalist, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t do that work as a civil servant, it just means that it’s the nonprofits that are hiring for that work because the governments are largely contracting out under increasing pressure to find “efficiency”. This is part of a larger decades long national experiment by conservative economists and wealthy backers to treat government services like a commodity that people will move to find their optimal mix of government services. That may be the case for a very small class of wealthy people, but for the rest of us we’re more likely to have major life events dictate where we live and end up stuck with the services we have. The wealthy and corporations know this and continue to push this theory and privatization of government services to turn more and more of our fundamental government functions into commodities. Nonprofits are still corporations, and they end up being used for corporate tax exemptions with donations rather than having that money collected and spent directly by the government.
Ummm…Covid is why the place is a mess.
When you can’t be near someone w/o dying? It kinda makes for the perfect caper. right? Then let that happen for 2 years? You got a mess on your hands.
Progressives ended the pandemic. It could have been so much worse. Had Trump moved immediately? We could have had control in less than a year easy. EASY. It took getting nim out of office to turn everything around into the best economy this country has seen in decades.
Trash needles and debris everywhere still in the heart of the hill. Plus there’s never a trash can when you need one so no wonder people just dumb crap.
I see people “dumping crap” all day long. They just throw their shit on the ground. It’s every kinda person. Not just the “low lifes” or addicts etc. Naw. You’d be surprised.
And what is wrong with putting it in your pocket till you find a can? My Mama taught me to do that. Did not yours?
Sometimes dumpster divers create a huge mess. All sorts of sources of trash on our streets. Your mini morality is not helpful but irritating. Be part of the solution instead of just lecturing people.
I am not talking about the dumpster divers.
I am talking about just average people. Kids are notorious. I see it all day is all. As for the homeless/street folks? They are really bad. They do not care. They are just kinda mad at the world and treat it as such.
For example.
The bus shelters. There’s trash cans right there. They stay in them overnight. no problem. But they leave a ginormous amount of trash behind. It crazy. How can you produce THAT much trash every single night? I have no idea. I’d say a good 50% is cardboard. No biggy. But it’s the other 50%. I understand needles and foil etc. But the trash in general is stunning. It’s every day too. They fill up the trash cans too. It’s not like they forgo the cans completely. It is one of life’s mysteries I guess.
But yes, for real, I see people tear the wrapper off and drop it. Or drop something accidently. Then not pick it up. I am serious. A completely normally presented person. It’s just a tiny tiny fraction overall. But they have a lot of garbage for some reason. Don’t care for some reason. It’s a thing man. I am not deflecting. It’s a bizarre phenomena I’ve seen since Covid. It’s like we are still hungover by judging appearances.
“The Find It, Fix It app is focused on issues around cleanliness and rubbish but stats from the show that a bulk of the system’s calls are related to homelessness even though the app’s categories don’t show choices like “encampment” or “tents.” ”
Correction: On FiFi, there is a category for reporting “unauthorized encampments.”
There has been a dead Tesla on 15th for months that has been collecting trash.
Want to get the streets cleaned? Starting towing all of the dead cars so that the street sweepers can start to remove the trash blocking the storm drains.
Report it as an abandoned vehicle with the find-it fix-it app, it might take a few weeks but should be addressed.
You can also report blocked storm drains!