Why do people throw out old motors, bicycles, anything metal into rivers and lakes instead of a junk yard or the trash system?
Why do people throw out old motors, bicycles, anything metal into rivers and lakes instead of a junk yard or the trash system?
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.
Lack of proper disposal facilities and/or fees for using said facilities. Easier to dump something in a lake or in the bushes than driving 40 minutes across town to a special facility and paying $30+ to dispose of it properly.
Everyone who disposes properly has to pay a fee. The only ones who have to pay the fine for dumping are those that get caught.
Solution: turn responsible disposal into a game, where if you can successfully sneak your trash to the correct section of the disposal center without anyone noticing, you get paid the amount you would have had to pay as a fee.
Canada used to do this, but then they switched to charging the disposal "eco" fee up front when you buy the product new. Everything from that point on has been free to dispose of. Any metal or electronics products are all saleable scrap though, so you can get paid for them if you take them to a metal recycler instead of the dump. A lot of places advertise free places to dump those products so they can take them in to sell. Some will even come pick them up for free as well. But if something doesn't have an eco fee or isn't otherwise valuable scrap or recyleable, you pay by weight to landfill it.
Depending on what it is the cost is a lot more than $30 which is a big reason these things get dumped. An old fridge with toxic coolant could be closer to $1k.
Fun fact, those refrigerents can be (and are required to be) reclaimed and sold to recyclers. Old refrigerants that can no longer be legaly produced are actually worth an absurd amount of money when reclaimed because they can still be used but because they can't legally be manufactured or imported the only source for them is stuff reclaimed out of other systems. Companies will pay absurd amounts of money to not have to refit their refrigeration systems to work with new refrigerants.
So if you have an old appliance still full of something like R-12 or R-22 then you have a gold mine to someone with the right equipment and certifications.
The bridge was closer, costs $0 (as long as you're not caught by law enforcement), and it's difficult to enforce no-dumping laws as garbage doesn't ID it's owner most of the time and you just can't watch every dumping spot 24/7.
The people that do this are also not particularly wealthy. It's hard to justify the cost of transport and disposal fees when you struggle to feed and house yourself.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
this is surprising to me. can't you get money for the scrap metal?
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.
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.
damn metal and electronics are free at the recycle station here. including bikes, appliances, broken screen leftover from phone repair, etc
Speaking to a few stories my dad's told me over the years, sometimes you're just a rural dumbass, have a large thing to get rid of, and want a big splash for your amusement
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.
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.
Is this a USA thing? No one does this in my country. WTF
Apparently they don't have free council dumps
I notice how you didn't write what country you're from. That suggests a lack of confidence, that you are expecting people to call you out on it.
But I could be wrong. I've been long before. What country?
For big times like furniture, engines, toilets, construction debris, etc it's to save money. You can't throw those things in a dumpster, and a trip to my local dump costs $160.
If it's big and metal there's a scrapyard that will, at the very least, take it off your hands for free. Free metal is free metal. Getting the big metal thing to the scrapyard is another story.
It’s unfortunate that waste disposal is one of those things that gets cut back (see, it doesn’t work. Let’s save money). I was pleasantly surprised by my town having more traditional service where they’ll pick up anything. For something big, like furniture, they want you to call ahead so they can send a flatbed, but they’ll take just about anything.
Meanwhile, my ex a couple towns over, has to pay per bag and you’re on your own for anything big
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.
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.
Because if it's metal it's dense and will sink, and disappear quickly.
Tossing something off a bridge without going to get it (ha!) leaves a problem for 'the others'. I've 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?
People do this because they're crackheads (or heroin addicts, or methheads, you get the idea). It's not a poverty issue, it's a drug issue. The person working a minimum wage job and sharing a studio apartment isn't going to dispose of their old bicycle in the river. The person who steals a bike and realizes they can't sell it to get their next fix probably isn't going to have a problem dumping it in a lake or river. They're already leaving needles on the playground, shitting on the sidewalk, and assaulting innocent people for not giving them a cigarette. Do you really think they give a damn about the environmental impact of dumping their stolen goods in a waterway?
Misinformation, you are lying.
Many factors contribute to higher illegal disposal rates. As stated by many researchers, the most common reason is poor waste management infrastructure, such as waste collection facilities and transportation [6,7,8]. Therefore, providing infrastructure may be a solution to reduce these business-as-usual (BAU) practices [9]. However, Sedova et al. found that illegal dumping behavior is also influenced by other factors such as education level, awareness, dumping cost, and income level [10]. Dumping costs are related to low-income communities. Communities tend to participate in illegal dumping practices rather than pay a certain amount of money [8]. source
I mean, I believe those studies, but I've also been homeless, been through shelters and camps and have known people who would just toss their broken shit into the woods or a river, whether it legitimately be theirs, or if they stole it.
Obviously not all homeless people do this, but some of them do.
This kind of stuff is usually the most visible to your average joe... so its not accurate to say it does not happen.
But at the same time, its likely that at a more grand societal level, those studies are fairly accurate.
I would be interested if the methodologies of those studies even took into account the homeless population.
Homeless people are kind of notoriously difficult to study or survey, as they are often migratory, have no... you know, permanent residence, and often do not want to be bothered.
Being wrong is not the same as lying.
A person working min wage and sharing a studio is actually highly likely to engage in illegal dumping. Ive known many people in my life who've done so because theyre too broke to afford a visit to the dump, both in monetary and wasted time terms.
Sometimes it's stolen material
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
I'm sure it happens, but if you've loaded an appliance in your truck already, and are able to dump it down a ravine or beside the road, you can do the same at 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 suspect a lot of it was part of a crime at some point and the perpetrators want to get rid of it anonymously and in a way that makes it take long for the object to surface. they are hoping any tracks leading to them will disappear or be hidden by them in that time.
It's organic recycling. It's better for the earth.
I think there may actually be some truth to this, but I don't know nearly enough to say so with any confidence
Throw it all into volcanoes?