Mississippi Today

How much trash does the Mississippi River funnel from the heartland to the ocean?

Published

1 year ago

December 29, 2023

The Mississippi River drains more than 40% of the continental U.S. – just how much trash does it take along with it?

That’s what a group of researchers and environmental advocates wanted to find out when they began a litter analysis of a handful of cities along the river a few years ago. This fall, they released what they’re calling the “first-ever snapshot of the state of plastic pollution along the Mississippi River.”

Between 2021 and 2022, volunteers from St. Paul, Minnesota; the Quad Cities area in Iowa and Illinois; St. Louis, Missouri; Greenville and Rosedale, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; logged trash they found into the University of Georgia’s Debris Tracker app. The study came on the heels of a 2018 commitment from mayors along the river to reduce plastic and trash.

Although many people might think oceanside cities bear the responsibility to keep plastic and trash out of the water, the Mississippi River can act as a funnel for that trash from the heart of the country to the Gulf of Mexico.

The study was also meant to raise people’s awareness of the river’s role in keeping other waters clean, said Jennifer Wendt, plastic waste reduction campaign manager for the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative — the mayors’ group that worked on the study.

For example, a piece of litter that someone tosses on the ground in Missouri could theoretically make its way through storm drains, to tributaries, to the Mississippi, to the Gulf and then to the ocean.

“It may not look like a plastic beverage bottle by the time it gets to the ocean, but it’s still there,” Wendt said.

Here’s what to know about the study results, what’s next for reducing plastic and trash along the river and how you can keep plastic out of important waterways.

What was the top trash found in the Mississippi River?

About 80,000 litter items were logged during the study’s data collection period.

Plastic was the top material found in and around the river, making up 75% of the total trash. Paper and lumber was next at 9%, followed by metal at 7%, glass at 5%, and personal protective equipment like masks at 2%.

The top 10 most commonly found items included:

11,278 cigarette butts
9,809 food wrappers
6,723 beverage bottles
5,747 foam fragments
4,239 hard plastic fragments
4,210 paper and cardboard items
3,882 plastic bags
3,640 aluminum or tin cans
3,260 foam or plastic cups
3,149 film fragments

Other notable finds include 825 masks, 480 items of clothing and shoes and 291 pieces of fishing gear.

In an optional survey after logging the trash they found, participants were asked if they cleaned it up. Close to three-fourths said yes.

What do the results tell us about litter habits?

People may not know that cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate, a type of plastic, Wendt said. They can take up to 10 years to decompose. And cigarettes can also leach other toxic chemicals into the water, according to the report.

Another intriguing finding was the amount of plastic beverage bottles and aluminum cans found, Wendt said — both of which are recyclable.

She noted that of the cities that took part in the study, only one of their states, Iowa, has a so-called “bottle bill,” in which people pay a five-cent deposit when they purchase a beverage container and get a five-cent refund if they return the container to a store or redemption center. Bottles were lower down on the litter list in the Quad Cities than in other places.

Legislation like that “is not very popular politically,” Wendt said, “but it does work.”

Some states along the river prohibit local bans of plastic bags, she pointed out.

What’s next for keeping plastic out of the river?

River-wide data collection has wrapped up, but Wendt said the next step is carrying out city-specific projects to reduce plastic pollution.

Those include providing funds to underserved neighborhoods in St. Louis and Baton Rouge so they can pursue what they see as integral to reducing waste, like installing water-filling stations, or developing a curriculum for schools to teach about recycling.

The mayors’ group will continue to work with the University of Georgia to do a comprehensive assessment of waste management in a few cities, Wendt said, and they’re also planning to work with cities that don’t have recycling programs to provide people a way to recycle.

Wendt maintained that while recycling is part of the solution, it’s not the only solution.

“(The discussion is) moving in the right direction, from ‘Oh, we just need to clean up litter…’ to, ‘Oh, we actually need to reduce the source if we’re going to have any real impact,’” she said.

What can people do to reduce plastic into waterways?

The biggest step people can take is to stop using plastic bags, Wendt said. That also goes for single-use plastic water bottles, she said, except for those who need to drink out of them because of water contamination.

Beyond that, talk to local retailers and see if they’d be willing to ask customers if they want a bag instead of assuming they do, she said, and ask if restaurants could switch to sustainable materials for carryout containers and leftovers. Consumers can push retailers to make changes like this, she said, though she acknowledged it works best when people approach retailers as a group.

Nationally, Wendt said more attention is needed for the role the Mississippi River plays in carrying plastic and trash.

When she attends events about reducing plastic, representatives from coastal cities are often the only ones at the table.

“There’s this whole rest of the middle of the country that needs a little bit of focus,” she said.

This story, the last in a three-part series, published in partnership with the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, part of Mississippi Today, is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, funded by the Walton Family Foundation.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session

Published

14 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-03 13:02:00

by Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
April 3, 2025

Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.

Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.

The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.

The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.

The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.

Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.

England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.

The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.

England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.

“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.

Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.

To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.

Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.

Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate

Published

1 day ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:34:00

by Michael Goldberg, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.

House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.

The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.

Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.

“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”

Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.

“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”

The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.

The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.

The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.

People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.

The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.

“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”

If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.

Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.

Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.

The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.

During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.

As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.

“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget

Published

1 day ago

April 2, 2025

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-02 16:13:00

by Taylor Vance, Mississippi Today
April 2, 2025

The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.

Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.

The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.

House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.

“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”

But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.

The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.

The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.

Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.

“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.

The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.

But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.

The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.

The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.

But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.

On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.

If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.

“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.

If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.