Month: June 2005

Thanks to increasing pressure in the trucking industry, this is becoming all too common:

Roadside litter comes in all shapes and sizes — from dirty diapers to syringes — but there’s one category that out-grosses the rest: trucker bombs.

Most drivers whiz along the nation’s highways largely oblivious to their roadside surroundings. But next time you are out there, take a closer look.

“As soon as you look for it you’ll see it,” says Megan Warfield, litter programs coordinator at Washington State’s Department of Ecology. “You just see them glistening in the sun. It’s just gross.”

They are trucker bombs, plastic jugs full of urine tossed by truckers, and even non-truckers, who refuse to make a proper potty stop to relieve themselves.

The state hasn’t counted how many such jugs are found each year, but a single, small county decided to do its own tally. “In one year,” Warfield says, “one crew found 2,666 bottles of urine, 67 feces-covered items, not including diapers, and 18 syringes.”

2,600 bottles of urine?!? Holy crap!

Apparently it’s such a problem in North Dakota that the state spent $15,000 to outfit their highway maintenance tractors with shields after workers were splashed by urine 20 to 40 times a year after running over bottles of urine with lawnmowers.

That’s just sick and wrong, and is going to make think twice when I’m looking at garbage along Hwy. 97 as I drive home. Thanks to Al’s Morning Meeting for the links.