Trash talk II: moving the mountain

O.K. I'll go with the flow. Writing about elections bores people, talking trash lights up readers like Safeco Field. People are outraged by the level of litter cascading on us.

In Hood River, Ore., writer Susan Hess of the Columbia Gorge Institute walks the streets of the small town and picks up three bags of trash a week, including telephone batteries, which are used to make amphetamine. The highway ramps of Hood River are as trashed as any place in Seattle or Portland. Following last week's column, J. Paul Blake, director of community efforts for Seattle Utilities, was quick to point out that cigarettes are the No. 1 litter problem in the world, with perhaps a trillion butts discarded annually. Blake and others are concerned that passage of Initiative 900, which spreads smokers away from doors of bars and restaurants, may add to the total litter deposit.

In downtown Seattle, the most organ-ized and expensive anti-trash campaign is being funded by the businesses that get dumped on the most. The Metropolitan Improvement District, using funds supplied by the companies and residents, collects trash on 225 square blocks of downtown. This is money the stores and firms put into trash collection beyond the city's ability to provide service.

According to Anita Woo of the Downtown Seattle Association, the level of trash collected by 30 private maintenance workers is staggering. According to Woo, in September, MID maintenance crews collected and removed:

• 19,983 buckets of trash;

• 1,008 piles of human waste;

• 4,784 buckets of leaves;

• 707 graffiti tags.

So far, they have also collected enough trash bags of leaves to match the height of the Seattle Space Needle three times.

Leaves, most people will agree, are not the problem. They crunch and eventually go away. Remaining are the diapers, soft-drink cans, tires, broken baby cribs, wrappers and coffee containers that are a river of contamination and ugliness.

Writing in the Hood River News, Hess summed up the heartbreaking aspects of trash in the West: "I grew up when roadsides were clean. At least in my memory they are. I remember the glorious sagebrush landscapes in Wyoming, Colorado's astonishing mountains, Nebraska's farmland, upper-state New York's verdant forests. I want others to see them as I saw them."

In Seattle, the quantification of litter is part of calibrating one neighborhood of downtown compared with another. Here's part of a report an MID maintenance inspector made in March of this year.

The inspector found a wall of litter north of Lenora, which is outside the MID — 34 pieces of litter per block, instead of three per block as in other parts of downtown.

"The very worst building," the inspector reported, "was the Qwest Center in Belltown at Second Avenue and Lenora with 76 pieces of trash in front of it, alone. The very best was the Securities Building, 1904 Third Avenue, where the building manager reported he goes out four times a day to clean up everything new."

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com