[Slugman]

Another haul today at the Arboretum area. 2.5 hours of digging beer cans out of the muddy bottom, and fishing up plastic bags and other crap. Plus 2 hours of regular paddling, and an hour round trip to drag the canoe on wheels from the Graham visitor center to Foster point.

[lookout bob]

Slugman....I deeply appreciate your efforts as I am a frequent user of those areas. I hope your volunteerism stimulates more people to spend some time to clean up our public areas and show some appreciation for them by curbing their trashing of areas. Many many thanks and keep up the good work.

[Slugman]

Please don’t quote that horrid sky hiker. He’s not even capable of reading the title of this thread before posting. The thread asks people to pick up trash, not to stop littering. His trashing of this thread is therefore doubly ridiculous. Then he posts the nonsense that you can’t pick up trash if you are too stupid to take action against a disease. What kind of person attacks a thread asking people to pick up litter?

[Mike Collins]

Slugman…Thank you for your community service. You are not alone with your efforts. For several years now when I go biking I pick up the cans/bottles/what-nots that I pass along the way. My circuit is Newport Way, Lakemont, and Coal Creek Parkway. Each year hundreds upon hundreds of things are picked up. The photo shows you the recyclables collected this past week.

[Cyclopath]

[crock]

Thank you to all who pick up garbage in the wilderness or in a local park or wherever. Your efforts are much appreciated.

[Cyclopath]

Snowy gathers trash from the neighborhood park and brings it to be rounded up and thrown away.

[Anne Elk]

Slugman - it appears that on some of your forays you collect a considerable amount of trash. What do you do with it afterward? My own trash can wouldn't be large enough to hold all of that plus the trash from my household, some weeks. Also - any idea what's up with the big tennis ball haul? Is there a dog park nearby the river?

[Sky Hiker]

Great Work Slugman, I applaud you on the effort to make the outdoors a better place. It's amazing that people will go out of their way just to litter than just going to a transfer station. I would rather they dump it off in my yard than dumping it in the woods where I end up climbing down the bank to haul trash bags of it up to my vehicle.

[Anne Elk]

[timberghost]

I don't know about the dump fee being the issue so much. I see them all the time with truck beds full going up to Sky to dump in the transfer station. If it's closed they aren't about to haul it back down so in the woods it goes. Sky started having a transfer station monitor incoming. Before that they would dump a whole load for $30. Now is the time when old RV's, trailers make their way up the valley to be abandoned.

[kiliki]

I drove from Seattle to Hood Canal last weekend via I-5 then over the Narrows and down around the Great Bend. Litter the whole !@$%* way though it eased up somewhat (not completely) along Hood Canal. I've bugged my legislators about this many times but I thought I'd read up on what the efforts are. I was kind of placated to see how many agencies are involved in picking up litter, and that the Dept of Ecology, the lead agency, gets how it affects people. The biggest source is unsecured loads, which also leads to crashes. $8.5 million spent last year, litter picked up along 22K of WA roads according to WSOT. Yet it's still so bad. Lots of info here if anyone is interested: https://ecology.wa.gov/Waste-Toxics/Solid-waste-litter/Litter The litter prevention part of that link is interesting. It's hard to make litterers care and they try to be really specific about how they do it.

[RichP]

I sent a message to the litter administrator for the corresponding region where I saw this on Lake Cavanaugh Rd yesterday. Kiliki's link provides contacts that connect to a host of agencies that address illegal dumping. The pile is growing as "trash begets trash."

[timberghost]

Were you able to get it all in your car?

[Slugman]

3 1/2 hours in the Arboretum today, digging trash out of the branches and pricker bushes along the shore, and up off the bottom. 4 1/2 hours total in the boat. I got scratched up pretty bad including my face, my boat was covered in twigs, sticks, branches, leaves, mud and spiders. But I scoured all the shoreline south of 520 including all the islands. I saw geese, mallards, mergansers, coots, cormorants, herons, turtles and beaver.