Five and a half half-racks: The Bottle Bill doesn’t work

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.

A Monument to Trash

May 11^th, 2014--Mothers Day

I knew better, but I did it anyways.  To be exact, I didn’t do it.  The last time I went to White Rocks, on May Day, I didn’t remove the fire pit.

Sometimes, I do (or don’t do) something I should know better, just to remind myself why.  It usually isn’t on purpose.  In this case, I’d already topped off a yellow litter bag with a dead animal that was left in a black plastic bag near the monument Clyde Garnett, who died in 1937 while trying to save a child from drowning.  I was getting tired, having covered an area that I haven’t picked up on a regular basis, west of the entrance.  I started tearing apart the fire pit, saw the amount of charcoal I would have to deal with after the wood and rocks, and reflected that a fire pit might not be such a bad thing here.  It is a bit of a recreation spot.

A week later, a lady I met in Reinhart Park told me that White Rocks was a mess; she wished she’d had some trash bags.  I said that I go there about once a week; I’d check it out.  A few days later on Sunday, a day I used to go to White Rocks all the time before I started changing my schedule, I decided to go there.

I could see the pile as I was driving up and parking.  I decided to pick up along the road first, and then deal with it.  I had one yellow bag in my truck; I hoped it was enough. 

Fortunately, there was relatively litter along the road, even though I covered the whole stretch from the upper turnout to the lower one, past the monument.  As I walked down in, there was a lot of little litter around the parking lot and a pile of trash to the upper side, near an opening to the parking space above. 

But my first target was the monument to trash that had been built there.  Someone had piled their trash in the fire pit, piled more rocks on it, added some more, and added more rocks.

The photo doesn’t quite do it justice.  I started to tear it apart right away, throwing the rocks on top into the tall grass and picking up trash, and then remembered I needed a photo.  So I dumped the trash in my bag back into it, put a few rocks from the edge of the pile on top, and took pictures.  It had a little less trash and more rocks.

Then I started really tearing it apart.  It took a lot of throwing to get all the rocks out, and the trash filled up the bag most of the way.  Once I worked my way down to the charcoal and ashes, I got my rake, shovel, and bucket, cleaned it up, and dumped the ashes back in the weeds.

Then I put my tools back, took a bucket and litter grabber, and cleaned up the rest of the place, filling the bag the rest of the way.

At the downstream end as I sat and relaxed, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: two pairs of Canada geese, accompanied by 10 large goslings, apparently raising their babies cooperatively. 

As they passed, I also saw another pair of geese with one very young gosling.  Apparently they lost a brood, laid more eggs, and only one survived. 

Something is eating young geese and causing cooperative parenting, or perhaps the cooperators were siblings.  I once had sibling cats that raised their kittens together.  Predation pressure can encourage cooperative parenting among birds.