I have been watching magnet fishing and people love to toss stuff over bridges without a second thought on the environmental impact. Hiding evidence I can almost understand but not lawnmowers, car batteries, etc.
It seems deeper fines should be made to discourage this terrible behavior.
Junk also tend to accumulate in rivers and lakes. Once it’s in there it’s out of sight, out of mind - and even if you know it’s there it is often difficult to remove.
When it finally gets cleaned up by bringing in the magnet or a barge to dredge it up or whatever, you’re seeing years if not decades of stuff that’s getting pulled out all at once.
I may or may not have done this back in my youth. If I did, it was because I had no idea how to dispose of a broken engine block. Now, I could set it at the curb and a scrapper will have it in their truck within a couple hours.
people are inherently lazy. fines are only for poor people.
if you want to solve the problem, provide an easy method for the general public to correctly dispose of shit, and let them know about it.
the issue being that that kind of social awareness and general action costs money, and conservatives would rather watch the world burn than have their taxes raised.
ye, and if you don’t like the negative connotations of “lazy,” substitute it with “attentive to making cost effective decisions.”
if it costs more, in time or in money, for an individual to properly dispose of something than the negative consequences of just chucking it in a river, the latter option will be chosen. this hilights the importance of community organization to set up a means for disposal, to make it accessible, and to make it known. by working together both the labor cost of disposal and the externality cost of environmental damage can be limited beyond what any individual could do.
Because if it’s metal it’s dense and will sink, and disappear quickly.
Laziness and/or poverty. It costs money to dump stuff like that legally most of the time. It also requires going somewhere usually not close to you.
I see answers for why people dump junk, but not why they dump it on rivers/lakes in particular.
To remedy that: dumping junk isn’t legal, and water is good at hiding things. If someone leaves their TV out on the street or whathaveyou, it might be traced back to them, but that’s less likely in a river.
They won’t pick it up from the curb so you gotta take it to the dump or landfill where you’re either charged to dump it or if it’s free your tax records are checked or if they don’t it’s only taken on certain days and hours.
That’s if you have the ability to transport it to the dump.
Around here you can leave it on the curb and someone will take it for metal. At worst you can find a guy on FB marketplace, Thrifty Nickel or some such that will pick up stuff for free.
I doubt that anyone has researched the origin of such junk in detail.
If it doesn’t fit in your rubbish bin, generally it costs time, effort and money to properly dispose of things. Tossing it off a bridge is efficient.
Likely there’s a not inconsiderable proportion of anti-social behaviour, like stealing a bike and throwing it into a waterway afterwards.
Mostly the second point. I would wager from experience that the majority of small man-portable conveyances that wind up at the bottom of lakes and rivers are there because they were stolen and thrown there. Bikes, motorcycles, rental scooters, shopping carts, etc. The reason is hooliganism, and the contributing factors are alcohol and teenagerhood.
Just for the record, teenage hooligans-in my experience -are actually preferable to the adult hooligans.
Seriously. Teenagers might get drunk and do stupid shit but they’re scared of getting caught and run away. Many times they’ll even clean up after themselves if you’re not a total dick.
Adults tend to stand their ground and pick fights.
(Also, every demographic you care to name steal shit. Sobriety, income, race. None of it matters.)
It’s mostly people that don’t have or don’t want to spend the money on the dump fees. Some localities have annual (or more frequent) days where workers pick up such items for free. This really cuts down on illegal dumping.
I would add that driving all the way to the dump with something in a truck isn’t something everyone’s able to do
It’s organic recycling. It’s better for the earth.
Throw it all into volcanoes?
I think there may actually be some truth to this, but I don’t know nearly enough to say so with any confidence
Best case, a load to my local dump is ~$15 min of general waste. Every appliance is $5 or 15 on top of that. I’ve tucked appliances in other appliance before to avoid the fee, but never dumped outside of the landfill.
this is surprising to me. can’t you get money for the scrap metal?
Steel is basically worthless for scap at consumer levels. Copper or aluminum is a different story, which is why a lot of drug addicts steal copper.
For most things you throw away, you can maybe get 50 cents at the a scrapper, of they even take the item
I mean thats fine though in the sense it did not cost you. Maybe I am just lucky that I have scrap places that are not to far away. Im in a city to so if you put something like that you will have randos in trucks grab it to bring it to the yards and get the 50 cents although it must be more because they seem to find it pays their gas and enough more to be doing it.
So much this, in NYC (less available now since Covid), there are dump sites for all this stuff (Batteries, Paint, Heavy Metals) as long as its personal amounts (ie cant come with a dump truck) it is at no cost. If you are a business and can not handle disposal fees, well you are unsustainable and should not exist.
Because big thing from high in water make big splashy-splashy.
(This is not me condoning tossing shit in lakes/rivers!)
It’s true, we cannot deny the allure of a BIG splishy-splashy.
A lot of it is stolen, stripped of what the theives want, and then dumped to get rid of evidence. Whatever is left anyway. The rest is simply because it’s cheaper than bringing it to the landfill. Landfill is $12-15 for a truckload. The fine is (up to) $10000 for illegal dumping where I am. Lots of risk, but the likelihood of getting caught at night is so low that it isn’t really a factor. Landfill really just needs to be free for individual residents. The amount the gov spends on cleanups is probably more than their $12.
Around here landfill usage is completely focused on commercial users. Costs $250/ton. Least they can give you is a half-ton. So if I want to get rid of my old bike legally, that’s $125.
What a helpful system that doesn’t contribute to littering and illegal dumping at all.
Tossing something off a bridge without going to get it (ha!) leaves a problem for ‘the others’. Ove seen conservatives talk about ‘the others’, be they immigrants or poors or blue-collar workers whondoman honest day’s work, all derisively as if they’re somehow lesswr-than.
Are we okay with leaving this kind of problem for working people, and in doing so looking like the lazy elitists that run half our governments as if they’re the rulers and we’re the scum? We don’t want to look like the baddies, do we?
I worry how the voting will go on this one. Make me proud, okay?
