Our Road Ditch Cleanup

Every year around Earth Day I clean up our right-of-way along the Cosgrove Road, prior to mowing the ditch bottom, which I have slightly modified into a walking trail. This year’s haul, from about 600 feet of ditch, filled two sleds, so it was time to take a break.

The mix was about the same as recent past years, with a lot of beverage containers, including 42 beer, 11 soda cans, many plastic bottles, and a few Styrofoam cups. There has always been more beer than pop, in part no doubt because of the open container law. Apparently the law isn’t preventing anyone from driving while drinking, they just toss the empties out the window to get rid of the evidence.

The cans, plastic, and everything crushable I’ve flattened to consolidate the load. I have no intention of trying to redeem the nickel deposits because the containers are filthy and some contain bugs, not stuff you want in a grocery store. HyVee and the other grocers always lobby to kill the nickel deposit so they don’t have to deal with the empties, and sanitation is their strongest argument. A nickel isn’t worth much nowadays, but if the deposit were 10 or 15 cents it might be worth someone’s while to set up separate redemption facilities, and worth other’s while to put more effort into gathering them before they turn into trash.

One new item this year is the packaging and inserts from an e-cigarette labeled JUUL. Must be fairly addictive, considering 4 packages in 500 feet of row on one side of the road. More their problem than mine thought. One year, perhaps a decade ago, we had quite a bit of other drug users paraphernalia appearing in the ditch, including needles. I walked the ditch regularly then with a jar to put them in because I didn’t want to puncture a tire on the tractor, and fortunately never did. Before that year’s cleanup, I asked the sheriff if he wanted any of the paraphernalia for evidence, but he said that it was commonplace and didn’t lead anywhere. He did offer to send someone out to gather that trash, to eliminate my risk, but I assured him that I could cope. I burned the rubber and plastic junk and took the needles in their jar to the hospital for disposal.

One of the most disgusting cleanups we’ve had was even longer ago. Apparently someone was changing a baby on their way to town and flinging dirty diapers out the window. Being large and partially white, you could pick out their trail after a while. I’m glad the kid finally got potty trained.

Occasionally a roadkill deer winds up near the edge of the road near our place and attracts vultures or eagles, who cannot get airborne quickly away from oncoming cars, and can become roadkill themselves. So I tractor-drag it away from the road out into an open field or prairie planting.

Early in our tenure on the property, probably 1977 or 1976, I burned our foreslope to get rid of the abundant paper, cardboard, and plastic litter, and reduce the amount of grassy/weedy fuel, which had accumulated over the decades. But it exposed an incredible amount of glass and metal debris, which had been hidden. We didn’t have plastic sleds then, so I attached cardboard boxes to our wooden toboggan and spent a weekend with our two oldest children hauling out the sooty trash.

The roadside cleanup is sorta symbolic of bigger environmental problems – a few people trying to compensate for the carelessness and indifference of their fellow citizens. It is good to belong to organizations like Bur Oak Land Trust and have others to share your efforts with.