The Landfill Making Its Way Towards the Ocean

Another great report from our Mussel Rockstar Jeff.

“Some photos I took at the Mussel Rock Cleanup today. Good turnout of volunteers, nearly 40 I think, and over 200 lbs of trash. I will comment on each photo individually.

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Toward the area of the “regular” landfill, lots of water runoff areas were present, this is one such area that was flowing water during the storms, you can see lots of little pieces of glass, thrown away between 40 and 60 years ago, making their way toward the ocean.

I also went to the section of landfill that is not supposed to be there, and found lots of recent erosion from the storms, the tire on the bottom right was firmly embedded into the hillside two months ago. Several sections fell here and intact and broken bottles were everywhere.

This one bottle and all these plastic pieces were found in the regular landfill area, eroded out of the hillside and about 35′ from the sea wall.

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Here are some of the old bottles, I also had about 1/5 of a bucket of just broken glass. Also found two old calendars, one from 1959 and one from 1960 along with a BofA card expired in November of 1959, all of this dates this section of the landfill to the late 50s/early 60s. Nothing older than 1961 has been found here. The biggest bottle is Clorox and they only made this type of bottle in 1958 and 1959.

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Calendars and BofA card, the bottle fragment is interesting since it says “refilling prohibited” when most use the word “forbidden”. I will try to clean up the cards later today along with some others I found a few months ago. “