How about a Beer??

I didn’t count the beer cans, just if there was a beer can in that 50 yard stretch. Sadly, 10 of the 16 spots had a beer can. Drinking and driving, probably, as you wouldn’t normally drink your beer, take the empty cans out to your car and drive down the road just to throw them away.

Every spot had a pop can. (When I use the word can, I mean either a can or bottle). I didn’t count the total cans at each spot, but thinking back, most had at least half a dozen cans of one sort or another in the spot.

If they were all worth a nickel, then a guy could probably make close to $300 picking them up over the whole stretch.

One other thing I noticed as a generalization, the ditches were cleaner on the northbound or East side of the road and a lot more trash was on the West side.

Was the wind responsible for carrying more trash west or just what was going on here? Some sort of Iowa—Minnesota trash each other plot? No, I doubt it, too much work.

Then today, I happened to be driving the tractor out to one of our woods, and with that big high platform, the cans just stood out so I decided to try and count them.

I just started on the gravel on the way out. 50 in the first mile, 12 in the second mile of gravel, and 16 in the last half mile. These were all on the North side of the road. On the way back, on the south side of that same stretch of gravel, there were 79 cans.

On the blacktop, on the east side only in two miles, I counted 255 cans, and in the final two miles of Highway 105 on the south side there were 138 cans.

Again, a “can” was any drink type container, pop, bottled water, glass beer bottle, plastic container. Most were beer though I didn’t separate them in my count, as it was hard enough just to get the raw numbers.

Pretty significant I think. It would be nice if people didn’t just toss their trash out the window wouldn’t it?