April 18, 2022
Bag Count - 3. Running Bag Count - 49 // plus reflections on community and rhetoric, apropos of an interview with Glitter-founder Morgan Berman
The cleanup. My friend Sarah — who lives in Pittsburgh — was in the area today, so, naturally, we got together for a cleanup. While driving through West Philly, we spotted this section of Wyalusing Ave between Lancaster and 47th:
We hopped out and got to work, and three trash bags later, had it looking like this:
Sarah wasn’t having a great time at first, but then it started raining and she had to pick up a dirty diaper and a bunch of condoms, so she ended up enjoying herself.
Random side note: there’s a really pretty catholic church near here — Our Mother of Sorrows — that was built in the late 1800s but closed its doors for good in 2017. Here’s a drawing of the original plan for the complex, which also included an asylum for orphaned boys:
And here’s a strange Inquirer story about the church, complete with malicious nuns, mysterious fortunes, and missing corpses.
Community and rhetoric. On Friday, I had the chance to sit down with Morgan Berman, founder of the street cleaning tech startup Glitter. I see Glitter as an exciting contribution to the fight against Philly’s trash crisis. For now, its cleaning services are entirely crowd-funded, and kudos to Berman for creating a scalable solution to a public sector problem with no institutional support. That said, she originally envisioned Glitter being funded largely by the city, and she came close to securing $100,000 from its 2020 budget. She worked closely with Councilman Mark Squilla, got feedback from Streets Department Commissioner Carlton Williams, and eventually got Glitter into the budget — only to have it nixed at the last minute as Williams revoked his support for her proposal.
Berman was incredibly frustrated. She conceived of Glitter in the first place because she was tired of stumbling over trash in the streets of the city she loves. If city officials couldn’t solve Philly’s litter problems alone, she figured she’d use her entrepreneurial skills to give them a hand. She came up with a viable plan to reduce litter city-wide and asked only for a modest amount of funding to get the plan off the ground. One would think that city leaders, who are constantly berated for the state of our streets, would welcome such a proposal with open arms — maybe even be desperate to throw money at it. Instead, they gave her the cold shoulder, seemingly content to prolong the filthy status quo.
It’s been years since that budget incident, but — having worked pro bono all this time to succeed in spite of the city’s stubborn refusal to help — Berman feels the frustration as freshly as if it happened yesterday. Her anger hasn’t faded, but her behavior has. Berman used to voice her frustrations publicly, tearing into city leaders for their failure to provide clean streets and their refusal to help her pick up their slack. Now, though, she thinks twice before using such emotionally charged rhetoric.
Even absent an official partnership with the city, Berman’s come to realize that Glitter has a better chance for success if she maintains healthy relationships with local officials. For instance — the company’s cleaners usually go out for weekly cleanups the day before trash day so that they can leave bags on the street for the city to collect. But for many streets in the city, litter is worst on the day after trash day. That may be counterintuitive, but it’s because the city’s trash cans don’t have lids on them, so a mind-boggling amount of garbage is spilled during the collection process. Accordingly, Berman has had a bunch of customer requests to change the timing of Glitter’s cleanups. She’d love to, but then her cleaners don’t have anything to do with the bags of trash. She had the idea of buying Glitter-branded trash cans to place on sponsored blocks, but the city’s zoning laws don’t allow it.
There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but getting special permission requires going through city government. And if you have to go through city government, it helps to be on good terms with the relevant officials and their staffers. Which means you probably don’t want to be quoted all over the place talking about how much they stink. Hence Berman’s change of perspective.
Berman has deep roots in Philly, but at times over the past few years she’s been tempted to leave, in part because of how dirty the city is. Instead of leaving, she chose to try her hand at cleaning it up. She could’ve packed up and left after the first bump in the road with the 2020 budget fiasco, but she stayed committed to her city and her vision for a better future. As she’s worked toward that better future, it seems she’s come to appreciate that no one person or group of people can do it all alone. She’s gotten Glitter standing on its own two feet in terms of funding, but she still needs help from the city when it comes to zoning issues. When you’re in it for the long-haul, like she is, you never know when you’re going to come up against an obstacle you’re helpless to overcome all on your own. And when you need someone else’s help, you better hope they want to help you.
In Berman’s experience with Glitter, I see a lesson on how community can serve as an important check on rhetoric. When you’re an active member of a community, and you’re striving to secure a better future, over time you learn to watch what you say. I think a lot of our discourse — whether online or in national media outlets — is unhinged precisely because so many tweeters and talking heads are uprooted. Being committed to a place and the people who call it home, you never know when you might walk by the face behind the name that’s on the tip of your tongue — or when you might need their help. But when you concern yourself with things happening far from home and with people you’ll never meet, it’s far too easy to speak irresponsibly about them.
Community has a humanizing effect on our rhetoric. It’s not that we cease to criticize and grow angry with each other; it’s just that, when we do, we know that someday we might have to answer for our words. And that makes us, like Berman, think twice about the things we say and how we say them. So here’s to having roots and thinking twice.