Bugged By Litter Snow Recedes, Baring Accumulated Crud

Buttercups aren’t the only things blooming on the spring landscape.

Paper, plastic, aluminum and tin - litter is everywhere, rotting along the roadside, caught by wind on barbed-wire fences and draped from streamside trees that were submerged during recent high water.

Twenty-seven years after the first Earth Day and 26 years since Washington residents voted to require litter bags in all cars, America remains a nation of litterbugs.

That’s apparent in early spring, when the snow recedes, baring four months of accumulated crud.

“Everyone’s thinking spring and you look, and ‘Yuk, all this litter,”’ said Gary Herron, superintendent of Riverside State Park, where spring clean-up means plucking trash from the serviceberries.

“This is something we fight every day,” said Wyn Birkenthal, manager of Spokane County parks. “We fight it at Liberty Lake. We fight it in the Dishman Hills. It’s part of the business.”

Sheets of plastic, wilted cardboard and chunks of insulation from the Spokane Valley Mall construction site clutter a half-mile of the Centennial Trail that Birkenthal manages. It was there even before Sunday night’s windstorm.

“I can assure you that it … will be cleaned up. Period,” JP Realty President Rex Frazier said Monday when told about the mess. Frazier’s Salt Lake City company is building the mall.

Trees and shrubs along several miles of the Palouse River are adorned with shredded plastic, like grotesque Christmas ornaments.

The source: an illegal dump about five miles downstream from the town of Colfax. The streamside dump, along with the “No Dumping” sign that marks it, was inundated when the river flooded in January, sending civilization’s discards toward the Pacific.

Fishing season at the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge south of Moses Lake means trash in the backcountry, said wildlife biologist Randy Hill. Styrofoam bait containers become as common as sagebrush each March in the refuge.

“There’s just a general disrespect” for the land, laments Hill. “People say, ‘I’m done with it, I’ll leave it here.’ “Beverage containers are the big thing when the weather gets warmer.”

Any driver brave enough to glance away from the potholes knows road shoulders are a mess.

“There has been comment around the state that litter has been pretty bad this year,” said Terence Todd, who organizes the Department of Ecology’s youth corps, the army of teens that picks up after slobs.

Todd said his agency is taking the unusual step of sending out teams of adults to spruce up medians and interchanges before the youth corps is available. For the next three months, six people will work for 12 weeks along state and federal highways in Eastern Washington.

Part of the problem, Todd said, is that his agency and the state Department of Transportation have had less money than they needed for clean-up and anti-litter campaigns the last four years. He thinks that will change with the new budget, but doubts people will quit littering.

Todd said he recently read a newspaper article noting that Washington is among the nation’s fastest-growing states. Other readers might have thought of economic opportunity or the need to protect natural resources.

Not Todd.

“My first reaction was, ‘More litterers.”’

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

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