Monday, April 22, 2013

Roadside Cleanup Yields Dozens Of CDs

Each year I take part in a cleanup day for my community where we divide up the area roads and head out with garbage bags and gloves to clean them up. I've been doing this for about 13 years now.

In that time, I've found that the types of trash I pick up from the roadside seems to go in trends. One year I found dozens of baggies of smoked cigarette butts. Another year there were empty whipped cream cans (the kind that projectile sprays out of the can) everywhere. One time I picked up probably a hundred of the little airline bottles of alcohol. All empty of course. And someone had an affinity for Red Dog beer one year in the early 2000s.

This year I found CDs. What, CDs? Yep, and I'm not sure why but I picked up dozens of them. Most of them like the one in the picture, recordable, not store bought. Who's "Her Majesty" anyway? I wanted to listen to it to find out but somehow misplaced the disc before I got back to my car to try it. And why was it on the roadside, along with a lot of others? Are CDs so outdated now that people just dispose of them by winging them out the window? Who knows but there were too many spread along about a two mile stretch, on both sides of the road, to be just one person's collection.

So, have you found anything good lately alongside the road?

2 comments:

Julie L said...

Recently I have found a plastic watering can, an ethnic-tyle hair pick, a tube of Burts Bees Honey lip balm, and instructions for hanging a window blind.

In the more distant past we have found a bowling ball, yard rake, sunglasses, a cell phone, a pair of silver hoop earrings (right in front of my house - finders keepers!)

SRTC Staff said...

Dang, you sure you're not actually IN people's yards when you find this stuff? I mean a bowling ball?? Who loses something cool like that?!


About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.