Trashing The Planet (or at least one little corner of it)

[CobyRupert]

even the gentleman's club's provide better entertainment per hour pricing!!

At $2400/hr, do you only have to pay $120 if you use their "entertainment" for 3 minutes ? Asking for a friend.

 

[Richard]

Kind of tough when you find out it's your father in law and uncle in law who created the trash pile (or ravine) on the backside of their property... You can't make too much of a commotion about finding it.

Today, that generation has passed and the next generation (my wife & her relatives) are considering selling the 250 acre farm. I'm STILL scratching my head... they're looking to just get rid of it.

I'm looking around and seeing that we are on a (nice) lake, surrounded on three sides by water so it's very private. If someone wanted to develop it, they'd have a wonderful secluded area here.

Potential buyer comes to the land, wants to drive around & see it.... and they see a trash pile of old dead rotary cutters, bailers and some other trash. They see the contents of an old shack that was smashed by a tree that fell over. There was also a lean to (correct spelling?) storage shed, next to the shack...that's also smashed.

They drive down the path to the back side of the farm and see the ravine... oh look....decades of plastic, glass, couple tires...

Same thing you're all seeing. If I'm a potential buyer, I start dropping my price for the place as it looks like it's been neglected and well.....trashed by the owners.

I'm still trying to figure out a politically polite way to tell the wife that if they really want to sell the place and get a nice price for it (verses just "dumping" the place) then they should call ALL hands on deck and EVERYONE should join in to clean it up.


Meanwhile, I travel around with a plastic bag as I cut the place and pick up various bits & pieces while on the tractor.

I need to travel around with the loader bucket so I can get bigger stuff but would really be nice if I had some extra hands joining in. After all, they're the ones that will get the sales proceeds.... not me.

Still.... I can't stand to see the junk so have to do something about it.

 

[deezler]

My property is sadly burdened with some of the same problems. 19 vacant acres, looks pristine on the aerial map and at first glance when walking around, so we buy it. Then I start finding things. Old tires. shoes. Appliances buried in the brush.

Find out from neighbor Bob that there used to be a house up near the road. When it burned partially and the owners had to move out, the local fire department held a training fire to get it completely burnt to the ground. Then what do they do? Leave all the burnt crap and a house full of contents laying there to be absorbed by the forest. Disgusting!

First time trying to clear out some area on the sides of my driveway, and BOOM, I back the brush hog right into a half full jug of Thompson's water seal. What the F^&*, Bob? (neighbor). Then I dig deeper, he also left me used fluorescent light tubes, half full jugs of paint, tons of plastic crap. Just dumped into the woods on what is now MY property. So. Gross. I'm going to get the rest of it pulled out of the brush and dirt this spring before the leaves come in, and then forget about it and hope whatever I missed isn't poisoning my well water. Ugh.

 

[fishheadbob]

It's the country, and it seems that's the way it was. When we moved here in 1979, is asked the departing guy what day for garbage, he said Monday. My wife said his wife told her Wednesday. Actually it's Friday. I think I could have built a 1953 Mercury from all the scrap auto parts piled up in and near various sheds. Most of their garbage went into the woods, but we moved in in April after a snowy winter so a lot of it was still in the basement. Scrap wasn't worth doo-doo at the time so we just made trip after trip to the landfill with horse drawn plows and early mechanical implements, most of which had fruit trees growing through them.
I just came in from working up the garden where I found 2 railroad spikes.
Only good thing about the junk here and on neighbors places is that virtually all of it is before plastic so it may eventually return to the Earth.
My nephew -in-law moved in a few miles away, the kid is a born junkmeister. In 5 years he has built some formidable piles of crap to the point where he built a 2nd barn as the original can't hold any more.
There are some million dollar estates between my place and his. My wife hit it on the head 45 years ago when I kept asking her why it had to be like this. "It's the country. That's the way it is."

 

[quicksandfarmer]

First time trying to clear out some area on the sides of my driveway, and BOOM, I back the brush hog right into a half full jug of Thompson's water seal. What the F^&*, Bob? (neighbor). Then I dig deeper, he also left me used fluorescent light tubes, half full jugs of paint, tons of plastic crap. Just dumped into the woods on what is now MY property. So. Gross. I'm going to get the rest of it pulled out of the brush and dirt this spring before the leaves come in, and then forget about it and hope whatever I missed isn't poisoning my well water. Ugh.

That reads like a list of the stuff my town dump won't take.

 

[Beltzington]

There was junk all over the 8-acres we bought 10-years ago, the nastiest was a 1950's dilapidated 30-foot camping trailer stacked floor to ceiling with basically trash. Took several weekends a cutting torch and two 20' dumpsters but finally got rid of it. I was surprised how reasonable the dumpsters were, it worked out to about $175 per load delivered and dumped, you can fit a lot of trash into a 8' high dumpster, it would have been much more if I had tried hauling it myself.

I don't think you can generalize the type of people who can't through anything away, just take a look at the trash around the houses on the show "the last frontier" and I am sure some of them a very well off financially. But why live in a prestine area and trash it up, there is more going on then they "might need it someday."

My parents grew up just post depression and I couldn't get them to throw anything away, my dad would spend an hour digging through boxes of nuts and bolts looking for a matching pair when he could have gone to the hardware store and paid $1 and been done in 20-minutes, it almost killed them when they had to downsize and I dumped a couple hundred pounds of hardware and threw 15-year old cooking magazines away my mother had never taken the wrapping off.

When I started this I thought I had point but now I can't recall, maybe my mind is to cluttered. Now I remember:

Some folks are just filthy animals, we had a very nice outdoor public gun range literaly 20-miles from any town, people would come out there and shoot up bottles and cans, leave their trash on the shooting benches, shoot holes in everything except targets etc. I finally just stopped going when I was hauling three leaf bags of garbage away with me and it wasn't even making a dent.

 

[Steppenwolfe]

Shoot... We found a whole cemetery... Probably a dozen graves. 3 old still sites, and two dumps from two houses on the 95 acres. Wifey likes hunting for the old bottles, but I'm staying out of the graveyard.

 

[DrRod]

I had some friends who bought a small farm for their horses. In the middle of the pasture was a deep, long ditch full of trash. They set about to lean it out. They pulled out a couple of trash bags and found the filled with old movie film and even an old projector. So they cleaned it all up and sat down to see what they had and discovered about 20 years of homemade ****. They even recognized some of the neighbors minus 30 years. There were dozens of tapes from the thirties and forties. hey ended up donating it to the National Museum of Pornography in D.C.

 

[rademamj]

Its incredible how sloppy and Lazy some previous owners of rural property can be. In my case, I purchased 27 acres, with about 7 acres containing bottles, cans, old refrigerators, tires, thousands of feet of barb wire distributed in many different piles, discarded concrete everywhere containing rebar. I even found an old school bus from about 1950 age, hidden away on my lot. I think the previous owner may have been charging a fee to dump on his property.

Cleaning up so far has resulted in eight 20yrd dumpsters being sent to the dump, followed by a detailed final search looking for any remaining debris that could damage a rotary cutter. I walk everything twice to be sure....before giving any area an all clear for the rotary cutter.

 

[95XL883]

I think there are two types that dump on their own ground.

The first is one of the prior owners of my 40 acres. He just took a bulldozer and pushed stuff around until it was buried. The problem was he didn't bury a lot of it below the frost line so more comes to the surface each year. So far, I've found an old log chain, old fan belts, a couple of old tires, an old alternator, miscellaneous equipment brackets, beer cans, bottles, barbed wire, a couple of T-posts, an 6 inch metal pipe, a bunch of old plastic pipe, a pallet, old vehicle lights, an old box spring (just the springs, the material is long gone), some old broken tile and a metal 3x3x3 box open on one side. Most of it I've been able to pick up and take home to the trash bin. Some of it is only part exposed and won't pull out. (That box spring is a pain. Mostly buried and in a location I can't back the tractor to and drag out. I know where he moved and his current place isn't much better. He's just a slob who doesn't care what he dumps anywhere.

The other type is like the guy who has the 11 acres to my west. To most people it looks like a bad junk yard. From talking to him, it is obvious he grew up dirt poor and in an abusive household. He worked for the gas company and would come across stuff people would give him if he just took it away. Some of it is pure junk. The worst is an old mobile home that is collapsing. One side of it is completely down and the roof is mostly caved in. Some of it is pretty interesting. He has some old cars that would be really cool in the right hands, several 1930's Chevy's, an old Suburban, he had an old Karman Ghia but that left recently. I'm told he has some really nice stuff stored in the metal barn he had built. There is an old tractor that would be cool if it was restored. Some of the cars are just junk, a 1977 Camaro, an old Pinto, etc. He has some old light poles from the early 1900's. Those are pretty cool and could be a very neat item in the right setting. Basically, this stuff is all treasure to him. He is very protective of it. But he has screwed up the title to the ground. He titled it in the name of a corporation that has never existed in this state. He will own that ground till he dies. The attorney's fee to fix that title will be quite expensive I expect and probably take several years, may even lead to fight if somebody tries to say it is a corporation from another state. But this is him trying to cling things he could never have as a child. Lucky for me it is mostly out of sight.