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You could devise a caption with a light touch, something like “Trophies of champion car-chasing dog who kept catching them.” But the reality paints a picture as black as the subjects themselves: Illegally-dumped tires piled in mounds rising higher than most people, so numerous they stretch in a line longer than a full-sized tractor trailer rig.
As a Monday story reported, about 50 volunteers carried and rolled an estimated 5,000 tires into those piles while cleaning up the Sugar Notch Trail in part of the Pinchot State Forest. And the name of the event matters. “The Sugar Notch Run Watershed Clean Up” offers an important reason illegal dumping in this (or almost any other spot) poses serious risks. Polluting a watershed pollutes water necessary for all life — plants, animals and us.
It’s a lesson everyone should have learned some time ago. Pretty much every place is a watershed to some creek or river, and those waterways serve as irreplaceable parts of not just a healthy life, but of survival. It’s not an exaggeration: Pollute our rivers and streams enough, and we’re pretty much doomed.
Yet people can’t seem to stop dumping trash in not-so-remote places in the belief that, somehow, out of sight is out of relevance. No doubt this is often a matter of money, as some believe they can’t afford to properly dispose of the waste. Those people need to understand an old economic principal called TINSTAAFL.
The mouthful is short for “There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” (A variation uses “Their Ain’t …” but we opt for proper English). The origin story is murky; some suggest the term arose in the 1800s when saloons would offer free lunches with the purchase of drinks, pricing the booze to more than offset the expense of the meal.
In the case of the illegally-dumped tires, those who believe they saved money need to understand that other costs go up as a consequence. Volunteers may have cleaned the trail, but they did so at the expense of doing other things that may have been more productive to us all. Box trucks provided by The Tire Guys business hauled the recovered tires for proper disposal, but it costs money to buy and run those trucks, and to run the disposal center. Those costs don’t evaporate into thin air; they are passed on to others, ultimately hitting all of us, most likely as higher taxes or higher costs the next time we buy a tire (or both).
There’s also the cost of pollutants the tires leeched into the ground and water between being dumped and cleaned up. All their additives, synthetics and oil end up in the environment. Tires are also breeding grounds to vermin and mosquitoes, which in turn can be vectors of diseases. It is a perfectly plausible scenario to envision a person dumping a tire illegally that becomes a nest for a mosquito that then transmits the virus to the person who dumped the tire.
We thank all those involved in the clean-up, but this is one of those problems that never should exist. People need to understand — really understand — that illegal dumping does not solve a problem, it compounds it.