Fall 2004
1 person's garbage: everyone's problem
by Conner Clark-Lindh
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Trash dumped at the end of Iron Gate Road spills over the blacktop and gravel into the bordering wetlands. |
It’s early October, and trash lies heaped next to a muddy ditch at the end of Iron Gate Road: soggy, dirt-stained socks, tattered black chairs, a cracked dartboard, globe kitchen lights — still in their boxes — a waterlogged pile of jeans and an empty Trojan Magnum condom carton.
“I always hated it,” said Don Knutson, the former litter-control officer for the city of Bellingham, looking over the pile of trash. Iron Gate Road extends past local repair shops and contractors’ offices and dead-ends in a forested, marshy area near Sunset Pond.
Eight years ago, Knutson received a call reporting four to five truckloads of garbage dumped at the road’s end.
When Knutson arrived in his city-issued pickup truck, he pulled on rubber gloves, ripped open the bags and dug through the soggy, coffee-stained trash. He found many crumpled letters and called the woman listed. She asked Knutson to come to her office in downtown Bellingham.
“What did he do now?” she asked when Knutson walked into her office in full uniform. The woman had asked her son to dispose of the garbage. Instead he took the money and dumped the trash at the end of Iron Gate Road.
“She said, ‘I’ll kill that kid,’ ” Knutson recalled, smiling.
Instead of fining her more than $3,000, Knutson asked her son to clean up the mess and leave the disposal receipts on his desk by Monday.
“On Monday morning, I had all those bills on my desk,” he said.
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Don Knutson sifts through garbage at the end of Iron Gate Road. |
Illegal dumping, fly dumping, midnight dumping, open dumping or wildcat dumping — all mean the same thing: a disregard for other people and the environment. The Washington State Department of Ecology cleaned up more than 3 million pounds of litter and illegally dumped refuse from public land between June 2003 and July 2004. The Washington State Department of Transportation cleaned up an additional 16 million pounds of litter from public roads. No government agency records the amount of refuse dumped on private land.
Knutson started a 30-year career of public service after graduating from
Western Washington University in 1973. He spent 13 of those years enforcing litter and illegal-dumping laws within the city limits.
After Knutson retired last year, a city police officer replaced him. At the end of September, that officer also retired, leaving the position vacant until Nov. 1, 2004. By the end of October, the ditches and wetland pools bordering the Iron Gate Road were filled with more trash.
Into mid-October, six Diet Pepsi bottles, more than 10 pounds of crumbling drywall, four empty motor-oil containers, a bottle of Mike’s Hard Cranberry Lemonade, a pair of underwear and a shredded pornographic magazine lay against a dirt mound in the shadow of a white sign: Illegal dumping prohibited by city ordinance.
“How do you stop someone who knows what they are doing is wrong?” asked Anna Lewis, Ecology’s litter programs interim coordinator. “There isn’t a lot you can do, and that makes us feel pretty helpless.”
Some people don’t have access to legal dumping facilities. Others don’t have money to dispose of their junk legally. But mostly, people simply are not aware of what they are doing, said Kyle Dodd, the environmental health specialist for Whatcom County.
“People don’t see the connection between dumping and contamination,” Dodd said. He
responds to complaints of dumping outside Bellingham city limits.
One day, Dodd even found a bloated, rotting pig in the middle of the road.
“I am pretty sure it was all there,” he said. “You can’t track the owner down on that.”
A Whatcom County road crew removed it.
“For what little it costs to dump stuff at Recomp (a local disposal site), they don’t need to dump it (at Iron Gate),” Knutson said. At a local transfer station, the dumpers could have disposed of their cracked chairs and dartboard for roughly $5, he said.
Billie-Gwen Russell, the litter and recycling program manager for Washington State Parks, said she deals with especially obnoxious dumpers.
“The people who are dumping actually feel they are entitled,” she said. “Their parents dumped, their grandparents dumped and their great-grandparents dumped all in the same spot.”
Because anyone can dump unnoticed, no agency knows how many people illegally dump each year. When Knutson or Dodd cannot find the people responsible for dumping, taxpayers or property owners pay the bill.
Goodwill Industries International Inc. and other charities that accept donations are often targets of midnight dumping. These charities dispose of the garbage before it spreads into the environment, but it costs them. Seattle Goodwill spent approximately $66,500 last year to dispose of illegally dumped trash at its 12 stores in the Pacific Northwest, according to statistics from Roberto Sanchez, a Seattle Goodwill public-relations specialist.
The money Seattle Goodwill spends each month to clean up dumped refuse could be spent on job-training programs and other community services, Sanchez said.
“We are very thankful for the donations,” he said. “But people shouldn’t assume there is no cost to us when they illegally dump on our properties. It is going to hurt us and indirectly hurt the communities and people we serve.”
Dumpers may not realize it, but they have many alternatives to dumping.
Anyone can resell clothing and household items or donate them to charities like Goodwill, Value Village or The Salvation Army. Plastics and paper can be recycled, and trash can be buried in a landfill, separating it from the environment.
To slow illegal dumping, Ecology and enforcers like Knutson use a combination of education and enforcement.
“His job may have been about garbage, but really it was about people and educating them,” said Joe Rutan, Knutson’s former boss at the Bellingham Parks & Recreation Department.
When enforcers receive reports of illegal dumping and they can find a name or address, they send a letter explaining the dumping laws to the person listed. If an enforcer finds three letters, receipts or labels that included the dumper’s name, he or she can write that person a ticket.
According to state law, police officers can fine dumpers $5,000 and jail them for as long as one year for dumping more than 1 cubic yard. The ticket is a gross misdemeanor, like a DUI.
The piles dumped at Iron Gate totaled more than one cubic yard.
Knutson said he could not remember writing any tickets in his final year, but when he started on the job, he was writing as many as 13 a year. He said the average was probably two. City records show Knutson responded to more than 450 littering and dumping complaints each year.
“Usually, if (the dumper) called me, I would just tell ’em, ‘Go pick it up,’ ” Knutson said. “In most cases, they would call and apologize, be embarrassed and take care of it.”
The “Litter and it will hurt” campaign is another effort by Ecology to reduce the amount of garbage dumped each year. After posting signs, running commercials and regularly advertising a toll-free number to report littering, Ecology found 83 percent of people surveyed believed they were likely to be caught and fined for dumping. Before the start of the campaign, the response was 73 percent.
It is impossible to measure exactly how much garbage is dumped each year. No government agency keeps records of national dumping rates. While
Ecology is the regulatory agency for all cleanup programs in Washington state, the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Corrections, the Washington State Parks department and the Department of Transportation independently report cleanups.
A 2001 report Russell prepared for Natural Resources on dumping and littering found the department spends approximately $529,000 annually cleaning up litter, dump sites and hazardous materials.
Last year, the Community Litter Cleanup Program, Ecology Youth Corps and the departments of Corrections and Natural Resources removed 88,376 pounds of litter and trash from Whatcom County.
Bellingham Police Lt. Craige Ambrose handled dumping complaints within the city limits during October while the position of litter-control officer was vacant. He said the smaller dumps could wait for a new litter-control officer.
“It is not unexpected,” Ambrose said about dumping. “All sorts of stuff is being dumped all over the city. We would like to clean it all up, but all that stuff can wait.”
At the end of October, a roll of sodden carpet and a rusted water heater joined the trash heap. Two days later, high school love letters, movie ticket stubs, prom pictures and a car battery in a cardboard box lay scattered around the end of Iron Gate Road.