Future generations of archaeologists are likely to scratch their heads at Monte Sano Park in Scotlandville. In the grass, a toilet bowl lies next to a smoke detector. Nearby, weeds grow through the trunk of a Ford Roadster, parked next to an abandoned motorboat. 

Underneath a section of Interstate 110, litter peppers the ground. During rains, streams of plastic and Styrofoam flow a few feet down into Monte Sano Bayou, its banks lined with hundreds of car tires.

“They had been dumping tires in this bayou for two decades,” said Trevor Besse, regional manager for Mobile, Alabama-based Osprey Initiative.  

The site, notorious for illegal dumping in Baton Rouge, is strategically located for someone in the litter business. Besse’s staff has already removed hundreds of tires, and he’s working to secure a permit to take the rest — estimated at around 2,500 — to a local recycling facility. Clearing the motorboat, though, involves messier paperwork, Besse said.

Last year, BREC, the LSU Agricultural Center and ExxonMobil sought out Osprey Initiative to clean more than 600 pounds of trash from the park. The company has led similar cleanups at five other sites in Baton Rouge.

A few hundred yards downstream from the interstate, another employee, Seth Ransbottom, maneuvers a canoe toward a rubber boom that cuts across the bayou. Osprey installs and maintains devices that harness the water to collect trash in small waterways.

“Stopping our litter in the small water is way easier than having to try and get it in the big water,” said Besse. “We want to be as close to the source as possible.”

The company’s low-tech devices are its hallmark and are becoming more visible in waterways across the country. Osprey collects granular data to map trash hot spots, and also tackles large-scale recycling initiatives, including leading recycling efforts during this year’s Super Bowl week in New Orleans.

Buoyed in part by corporate sustainability initiatives and demand for urban green spaces, Osprey Initiative has collected over 230,000 pounds of trash and expanded its services to 19 parishes, 30 states, and three countries since its founding in 2017.

“There is a need and want to increase wetlands and walking trails, but no one planned for the litter,” said Osprey’s founder, Don Bates, who grew up in Tangipahoa Parish.

Where water goes, litter follows

In a pocket of woods across town, Bates explains the roots of junk.

“Population density drives litter, it’s just that simple,” he said. When it rains, most litter flows to storm drains, through culverts and into waterways. Junk that doesn’t sink often makes its way to the Mississippi River, and eventually the Atlantic, Bates said. “Where the water goes, the litter goes with it.”

He’s at a project site at the Burden Museum & Gardens, 440 acres of botanic gardens, walking trails and an outdoor rural life museum — an oasis among strip malls and hotels where you can still hear the roar of Interstate 10.

Bates’s “litter corrals” are vertical nets situated in “borrow pits”, small depressions created after the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development excavated the area to build the interstate in the 1960s. Over the years, water from Ward Creek — one of the city’s main drainage corridors — pumped into basins during rainstorms, depositing trash as it slowly receded.

When the LSU AgCenter, which oversees the Burden Museum & Gardens, decided to expand its walking trails in 2022, it discovered a 10-acre landfill. Bates’s team and a group of local volunteers cleared decades of trash by hand, then tracked where new debris accumulated after storms, positioning traps to intercept it.

“We get dirty,” said Bates. “We don’t sit in a room and draw it up on paper and tell the people in the field what it’s supposed to look like.

He pointed to the lip of one hollow, where clumps of garbage and a few pieces of trash were seemingly held back by his web of nets.

“This is proof of concept,” Bates said. “That’s all detritus from a high-flow event.”

At Capitol Lakes, an EPA Superfund site overlooked by the Governor’s Mansion, the company has set up its patented “Litter-Gitter” floats — an aluminum cage with side booms that funnel debris inward. Without netting below, wildlife can pass under it, boats can slide over it, and floating litter gets trapped. Bates says his secret sauce is year-round maintenance: checking traps at least twice a month, plus after every heavy rain.

Osprey Initiative repeats the process across North America — from Mobile to Minnesota to Mexico — funded by grants and partnerships with nonprofits, city governments, and large corporations like Exxon, Coca-Cola and Niagara Bottling. Bates says his private, for-profit company has increased its revenue by 30% each year.

“We’re the only one that has scaled it past a small geography,” he said. “Because our company does the maintenance, I can be a little aggressive with trying things.”

Meeting people where they are

Bates looks more like a commercial fisherman than a crunchy granola type, sporting blue jeans and a company-branded performance-fishing shirt. A former geologist, he was working at an engineering company when he invented the litter-gitter out of pool noodles and chicken wire.

The energetic 54-year-old named his company after the bird that made a comeback after DDT was banned in the 1970s — a victory for the environmental movement. Yet Bates considers himself more of a conservationist than an environmentalist.

“Environmentalists tend to be single-issue people without looking at all of the impacts…we got to meet people where they are,” he said. “They’ve made up their minds. They are anti-industry, anti-business.”

Still, he welcomes all types. Osprey’s 30 full-time employees include both tree huggers and former construction workers, Bates said, along with 30 part-timers and additional volunteers for larger cleanups. The company also runs recycling education programs at elementary schools in Mobile, with plans to expand to Tangipahoa Parish in January.

“We’re not a big preaching company, but our model is — if I can reduce my footprint, it can’t hurt,” said Bates.

Jeff Kuehny, the director of Burden Museum & Gardens, says the blend of for-profit and volunteer work has been key to cleanups in Baton Rouge.

“The thing about volunteers is that they go in cycles,” he said. “You need a company that’s able to do sustained work and that has the expertise that is needed.”

Litter is also known to clog drainage systems, said Kuehny, who is also a member of the Louisiana Stormwater Coalition, a group advocating for permanent funding to maintain city waterways and drainage systems.

In 2023, Louisiana — by most estimates the second rainiest state in the U.S. — became the 42nd state to pass legislation allowing local governments to levy stormwater fees for drainage maintenance and litter management, though the fees have yet to be proposed to voters in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. 

“The community has to be educated of the benefits it has to provide,” he said.  

Under former Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, nearly $50 million of federal grant funds were spent to clear more than 35,000 tons of debris from drainage channels across East Baton Rouge Parish. Kuehny and the Louisiana Stormwater Coalition are advocating for the parish to reconsider levying stormwater fees to prevent future clogging and help maintain long-term partnerships with organizations like Osprey Initiative, without relying on one-time grants.

He points to Florida, one of the first states to adopt stormwater utilities, where local governments saw it as a way to enhance tourism and quality of life.

“They wanted a clean state, and they have one,” he said. “The real impetus behind it was economic development.”

Sorting the loot

At Monte Sano, Ransbottom paddles to shore to unload his loot. He sorts it using standard EPA protocol — by material and degradation. Among the treasures: plastic bottles, a foam football, lots of Styrofoam packaging and wrapping from a pack of Swisher Sweets cigars. During the months after Mardi Gras, Besse says it’s more plastic cups, toy throws and plastic bags (beads sink to the bottom and are rarely recovered.)

No one’s found a body yet, though Bates once found a cremation urn he now endearingly calls Fritz.

“He’s at my office,” he said. “We saved him.”

Most of what they recover would otherwise break down into microplastics or other harmful materials, said Bates, disrupting ecosystems and human health. Once collected, the immediate challenge is what to do with it all.

In Louisiana, for example, no one has quite figured out what to do with hundreds of thousands of tires dumped on back roads and in waterways, not yet profitable to dispose of at scale.

“Tires are probably the biggest waste diversion strategy we need to work on,” said Besse.

Some plastics like PET (think water bottles) and HDPE (milk jugs), along with aluminum, can be easily recycled or scrapped locally. Styrofoam — the largest category Osprey finds in waterways — is often too degraded to recycle. Plastics like PVC, or contaminated materials, are known to be shipped to developing countries, where they may simply end up back in waterways.

“Wishful recycling is the biggest threat to recycling,” said Bates. “The biggest costs: fuel and sorting.”

Of the hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash Osprey has collected, about 14% is recyclable, according to data from their website. Osprey, for their part, meticulously sorts it all, then ships it to local facilities that process it for free. They also run mobile sorting centers at large-scale events like festivals and sporting events. During Super Bowl week in New Orleans, employees worked 20-hour days. After the game, Osprey cleared the entire stadium of cans and bottles. They’ve done the same at LSU and Tennessee Titans football games.

Bates, who lives on the road most of the year, speeding between meetings and cleanups, dreams of turning Osprey into an incubator for other eco-minded businesses. Meanwhile, Besse hopes to create a detailed map of Louisiana’s waterways, showing exactly where the biggest litter problems are.

“It’s getting the data and figuring out measures on land to prevent litter from getting in the water in the first place,” he said.

Both say the broader solution is to educate people about proper waste disposal. Thanks to anti-litter campaigns led by groups like Keep America Beautiful, littering is much more shunned than it was 50 years ago, though with America’s consumption habits unlikely to reduce anytime soon, waste will continue to find its way into water.

At Monte Sano Park, where children can play amid toilet bowls and tires, it’s clear Osprey isn’t going out of business anytime soon.

“We have played in these ditches and waters our whole lives,” said Bates. “In a rapidly growing world, protecting and having these green spaces for people to enjoy is a big part of our future.”