If you wander just a bit off the main road that runs through the LSU Burden Museum and Gardens toward the northwest corner of the site, you encounter a shocking sight that is as grotesque as the rest of Burden is beautiful: A sunken field of litter, about the size of a football field, filled with bottles, cans and other pieces of plastic trash that have accumulated over the years from nearby Ward’s Creek.
It’s an eye-opening example of the litter that winds up in Baton Rouge’s watershed every day, and a reminder of the difficulty in finding solutions to cleaning up the city’s mess.
Read on for more about the city’s litter problem and what’s being done to fix in in a story that appeared in Business Report‘s January 2021 issue.