Down-and-dirty New Yorkers are bagging everything from beer bottles to strollers — to even the kitchen sink — as part of a volunteer “Adopt Your Spot’’ program to clean up trashy parts of the city. Some of the best volunteer trash troops admit they are former litterers. “I didn’t think much of it — it was a natural habit,” Queens native Joyce Xu, 29, recently told The Post of her littering — as she used a special gizmo to pluck up everything from Shake Shack wrappers, 7-Eleven cups and KFC chicken bones along a pedestrian pathway near the Queens Center Mall.
“But as I grew up, I was getting to a stage where it felt wrong, because someone has to pick it up,” said the Rego Park resident — who now nets as many as five garbage bags of trash every other week from her clean-up spot as part of the program. Xu is one of more than New Yorkers who have pledged to maintain a spot free of litter for a full year through the effort, which launched through the city’s Department of Sanitation’s nonprofit partner, the Sanitation Foundation, this past spring. The fleet now picks up between 1,200 and 6,000 pounds of litter a month, the foundation said.
Brooklyn artist Avani Patel, another clean-up volunteer, “adopted” the 85-acre Calvert Vaux Park in Gravesend as well as the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the Shore Parkway bridge and parts of Cropsey Avenue. Patel began picking up trash himself three years ago, after noticing an abundance of garbage strewn around afte.