8/12/14
Before I even pulled up to
the farmer’s driveway and turned around to park in front of White Rock (a
popular fishing and recreation spot on Lower River Road, across the river from
Schroeder boat landing) I saw the boxes of bottles: 5 half-racks and a 6-pack. Someone had been feeling civic-minded enough
to gather their bottles and set them on the side of the road for some desperate
person to pick up and feed into machines for $3.80. Being bottles, no one on a bicycle would be
able to carry them, so that desperate person would have to be driving a car.
Instead, I picked them up
and stuck them in my truck. Before I
left, I remembered the need for a photo and recreated the scene. Between those two times, I cleaned the rest
of both sides of the road along the site, and then filled several grocery bags
with bottles and cans scattered among the rocks and sand, along with a couple
5-gallon buckets of regular trash.
At home, I ended up filling 2 half-full metal trash cans with the bottles and cans, which filled up
our 3 cans devoted to returnables, mostly beer containers.
It is not unusual to find a half-rack stash of cans when cleaning along
the river below the wastewater treatment plant; I found one such stash the next day. Sometimes they are easy to
get to. Other times, I have to reach
deep into the blackberries with my grabber to get them all.
I am finding so many that
Donnie is starting to wonder if it is worth the time and hassle of hauling them
to a store and putting them in the machines.
Obviously, I give them to him because it is not worth the hassle for me.
Before the machines, the
bottle bill kind of worked. Now, it
does not work at all for its stated purpose, which is to reduce litter.
It is not worth the trouble
for most people to haul them to the stores and put them in those very annoying
machines. But many people think that it
is some kind of charity to leave them on the ground for other people to
find. Some don’t like to put them in
trash cans, lest the money be lost. One
time, I found a kitchen trash bag full of cans at the back entrance to Burger King at Fruitdale where they had not been a few minutes earlier. It seems that someone saw me picking up
litter there and decided to be generous with their returnables and save themselves the hassle.
Those who actively look
for returnables go rooting through trash cans for them, and they are not
necessarily neat about it; they often leave the lids off the cans. I have to write “Trash only” on my yellow
litter bags that the city allows me to leave next to their trash cans in our
parks for pickup, because someone was dumping them in the trash cans and
searching for returnables, filling the can and making it useless for others.
On the other hand, when I
was on Work Crew and was cleaning up the string of camps along the Parkway, we
found a pile of quart beer bottles in a camp, along with separate piles of
food trash. These vagrants were apparently
stealing or begging for what they needed, and could not be bothered with those
heavy bottles for a nickel apiece.
The people who left those
boxes of bottles probably gathered the rest of their trash as they generated
it, just like their bottles, and took the trash away. But since they could not be bothered with
feeding the bottles into machines in a nasty, stinky room for nickel apiece,
they left them for someone else to take away, probably feeling really
charitable and civic-minded doing so.
If there was not a Bottle
Bill in Oregon, they probably would have taken their bottles with them, and
hauled them to the recycler for free.
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