You won’t find the word “plawker” in the dictionary. At least, not yet.
Sunni Purviance is the organizer and offers her definition, “Plawkers are folks in Roanoke that are getting together to pick up litter while walking. We take our little stroll, connect with our neighbors, get some exercise and pick up litter along the way.”
The group meets sometimes several days a week. They set a course of about a mile, and then they walk.
Purviance loosely lays out the plan for the day, “Generally, I like to have our group all stay together because I like to express to everyone, we’re not here just to cleanup. We’re here to socialize also— maybe more than the cleanup. So, we usually stay together as a group. And maybe we don’t get as much litter that way, but we get our socializing, we get our exercise, and we get the litter while we’re out there.”
On the morning I joined them, a group of about twenty armed themselves with hi-viz orange trash bags, latex gloves, and spring-loader pincher-grabbers to plawk along a stretch of Melrose Avenue in Roanoke.
Cameron Brock estimates that he’s been on about 150 walks with the group. I asked him why he feels it's important to be part of the effort.
“It’s nice to get the exercise," Brock says, "just to have something to do that isn’t sitting behind my desk. Try to get out and connect.”
Another volunteer, Heather Brush, has a particular focus and her reasons for it, “I’ve picked up a lot of things in the road that are hazards to tires. And I have replaced too many tires to not pick those up.”
Unfortunately, Purviance says there’s never a shortage of litter to pick up, “We cannot work ourselves out of a job. So, it’s not if we go to one place, we don’t need to go there again even next week. Anywhere we go, we’re going to find some litter, sadly.”
Most of the litter picked up is what you might expect: windblown wrappers, empty drink and food containers. But one recurring item is something you might not expect: socks!
Purviance explains the phenomenon this way: “It’s not that socks are odd. It’s the number of socks that we find. We noticed that we were finding socks almost every single time that we went out plawking. And, almost in every single neighborhood that we’ve plawked, we have found several socks and so, we started keeping track. The last couple years we were over three-hundred socks for the year.”
While she can’t explain exactly why they come across so many socks, but they do! So much so, that for newcomers to the group, finding your first sock is looked at as a sort of 'rite of passage'.
“It’s a thing. People are trying to fight each other and beat each other to find the first sock of the day. And when you find a sock, you have to hold it up like a prize fish and get your photo taken with it. It’s called a #plawk-sock just because it’s cute and it rhymes”, says Purviance with a smile.
The group’s efforts have not gone unnoticed and they were awarded the city of Roanoke’s Neighborhood Improvement Award in 2021.
More than making a temporary improvement, Brock says the group’s efforts may be having a lasting influence, “We have noticed that places that we’ve hit, at least year over year, like Jamison and Bullitt used to be really, really bad, we’ve seen less litter and that keeps us going because we are seeing a difference and we think other people are seeing us out, you know, picking it up. So, maybe they think twice before throwing it down.”
If you’d like to the join the Roanoke Plawkers, you can find where the group will be plawking next on their Facebook page.
