Libby Ratliff has toiled for eight years, but it’s hard to find evidence of her hard work.

That’s because all of Chilton County, it seems at times, is working against her.

Ratliff has been the county’s litter agent since 2004.

“In some parts we have made progress, but the sides of the road look like they always have,” she said. “When you go across this whole county, it doesn’t seem like you’ve made any progress.”

So you can understand Ratliff’s frustration when she spends a day or a week cleaning up a section of roadway, only to come back days later and it looks as though she had never visited.

Chilton County has a simple problem without a simple solution: People expect trash to be picked up, but there’s not nearly as much manpower removing trash as there is piling it up.

The garbage basically comes in two forms. Paper and plastic are tossed out along roadways from vehicles as people finish their burger and soft drink from their favorite fast food joint.

More difficult to fathom are the sites where people dump their household trash, including larger unwanted items such as furniture and doghouses. A particular spot becomes known as a makeshift landfill, and people continue to dump there, even if the site is cleaned and cameras are mounted nearby to catch litterers.

“As soon as people see those, they destroy them,” she said. “There are some spots that have been used as dumps forever. When I say they’re huge, they’re bigger than the Walmart parking lot.”

Ratliff has no permanent help in her war against waste. Sometimes she has a couple of inmates on work release ride along for a day, or maybe there are a couple of juveniles who need to fulfill their court-ordered community service obligation, but most days, it’s just Ratliff.

And there’s more to the job than picking up trash. If she can find a name and address mixed in with a pile of rubbish, Ratliff turns that information in to the county health department, who sends letters to the offenders, letting them know they are in violation of the law.

Ratliff also has tried anti-litter campaigns in schools, but such programs are costly and time consuming. After all, there’s always someone calling her to come get the trash off their road.

“People don’t even want to walk out of their homes and pick up trash on the side of the road in front of their house,” she said. “There’s one of me for the whole county. Until we get people willing to help, and until we get [laws] enforced, it’s going to stay the same as it is now.”