Litter Donations -- July 5, 2009 -- Lauderdale by the Sea, FL
Picked up litter this morning along the beach from behind Windjammer north to Anglin's Pier. I picked up from 7:00 to 8:20. There was litter strewn everywhere from all the people who came to watch our town's Fourth of July fireworks display at the beach last night.
There is NO excuse for all this littering. There are garbage containers at every portal to the beach, AND, there are now recycling containers at most of the portals. I'd say a good half of the litter picked up this morning was bottles and cans than can be recycled. I picked up one large garbage bag of trash and 5+ full grocery bags full of recycling.
Unfortunately not all the bottles and cans got recycled. The crew that picks up garbage was busy loading the trash from the waste cans into their truck. I set all my bags down in front of the recycling containers, which is about ten feet away from the waste cans they were working. They don't pick up the recycling. Someone else does that or they do it at a different time, I really don't know. Anyway, I walked about 50 feet away to take a picture of another trash container overflowing with garbage before the crew got to that can. (I wanted a picture for reference as I think not having enough cans, especially for holiday events, leads to additional litter). As I turned to walk back to my bags of recycling, one of
the crew was dumping my bag of recycling into the trash containers in the bed of his truck. I'm sure he thought he was doing something helpful -- he'd gone out of his way to walk over to the recycle container to get these bags. I was alarmed. I had not yet taken a photo to document the amount of litter and recycling collected and ran over to him and cried, "No! That's mine. I need to photograph it. It needs to go in the recycling." I asked for the bag back that he had just thrown in, but he said no and continued to dump the second bag, saying, "they're just bottles." I told him they are recycling, not just bottles, not garbage, but he kept repeating they're just bottles. He had picked up three of my five bags of recycling. I was able to retrieve one. He didn't seem to get the point about recycling and I'm sure he just thought I was a crazy person wanting the bottles. So in the picture, only three of the five brown bags of recycling are shown or were able to be recycled.
I didn't pick up any of the fireworks. In years past I have, but I've decided it just may not be smart to handle them so I left that (and one dirty diaper) for the Beach Raker.
Picked up one more bag heading south from the pier. There was some recycling in that bag also that had to be thrown away. Unfortunately, just south of the pier is one of the few locations where there is no recycling container at the beach entrance/exit .