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.
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.
It is free in Sweden but we still have bicycles under every bridge. My guess is the bicycles were stolen to get home from a night out, and then disposed of.
It’s not free for companies and private citizens always (afaik) have pay for garbage collection which includes access to recycling places (landfills are illegal)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Goddamn. It costs like thirty or forty bucks to throw out one of those items here (not construction debris–that’s too big/heavy).
There’s so much NIMBY about landfills they’re rare and very far apart, so they can get away with charging 4x what’s fair.
I mean to be fair having a landfill around would be one of the only things I’d be a NIMBY about.
I’d even accept a nuclear reactor over a landfill.
Both are very safe? I don’t understand
Oh dear, you’ve already forgotten about Fukushima, and it was only 13 years ago. It was a safe power plant, until it wasn’t, and then the city was destroyed.
Oh well, nobody could have predicted it. (Except for all of those people who did predict it. But let’s not worry about them. Let’s just forget about the whole event.)
It got hit by a 9.0 earthquake AND a tsunami, and only ONE guy MAYBE died from radiation, FOUR YEARS later.
I remember Fukushima.
You never knew Fukushima. You only knew the bullshit shoveled into your ears.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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