Now that winter is winding down, the snowmelt is revealing an ugly remnant of the season.<\/p>\n
Many of our state highways are littered with garbage.<\/p>\n
PennDOT says crews haven’t been able to do proper cleanups in weeks.<\/p>\n
It’s a late-winter affliction along state highways like Route 33 in Northampton County: Mile after mile of messy muck.<\/p>\n
The snow is gone and the trash is back.<\/p>\n
“First of all, I wonder how it got there in the first place,” said Eugene Search of Easton.<\/p>\n
“And it’s a ton of garbage. They no sooner pick it up and there’s just more garbage. I don’t know where it comes from,” said Mark Sokolowski of Palmer Township.<\/p>\n
On a muddy gray day, roadside trash can make it seem just a little bit uglier.<\/p>\n
But PennDOT says that cleanup is on the way.<\/p>\n
“Typically in the spring we will get a lot of complaints regarding the litter,” said Sean Brown, a PennDOT spokesman.<\/p>\n
In 2024, PennDOT spent more than 18 million dollars on trash removal.<\/p>\n
PennDOT picked up four million pounds in 2025.<\/p>\n
“(I’d like to see) a little more enforcement,” Sokolowski said.<\/p>\n
“Quite frankly, I’d like to see people who throw trash out of their cars ticketed,” Search said.<\/p>\n
Fines for littering on a Pennsylvania highway can range from 50 dollars for a first offense, to up to $1,000 for repeat offenders.<\/p>\n
PennDOT says it will resume trash collection in the coming days.<\/p>\n
“PA cleanup, adopt a highway, those things do get started,” Brown said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now that winter is winding down, the snowmelt is revealing an ugly remnant of the season. Many of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,153,155,154,12367],"class_list":["post-131121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-slate-belt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}