Prologue

As some may know, we have always had a bit of interest in trash here at Rural Ways.  We often scour the highways and byways for something useful and sometimes make a little money by recycling metals.  Recently, however, there has been an explosion of interest in trash at The Homestead due to the preliminary results of some scientific trash sampling in the Parowan Valley.

(DISCLAIMER:  Before beginning any discussion of trash, however, I think it is only fair to warn my reader about two problems.  First, while many may not know this, trash data—and the conclusions to be drawn from them—may be divisive and controversial.  It is difficult to discuss trash without discussing people and what they do.  So, if you are unprepared for Rural Ways to delve into issues of human evil—namely, beer and capitalism—you might better jump ahead to safer topics such as tree identification and house painting.  Second, despite our best efforts to design sampling protocols in such a way as to avoid spurious and biased conclusions, a number of data collection issues may become increasingly obvious as we publish our preliminary results.  It is, for example, difficult to identify trash after it has been through a rotary mower.  Because our sampling locations have been mowed at different frequencies, the results from one area may not be comparable to the results from another.  One way to control for this particular problem is to select trash that is less likely to be obliterated by a mower.  And, in this case, that is exactly what we have done.  So, if we are ready to move on from the legal small print and into the topic itself, I will begin by stating that we collected just one kind of trash:  cans.  These data and the conclusions we draw from them are from aluminum can trash.)

What did we count?  We counted cans along the road, from the edge of the pavement to the edge of the right-of-way—basically we were surveying drive-by trash, trash in the ditch, trash out the window.  For every quarter mile we did a 100% can count by species on both sides of the road.  We did this for six road segments—each 1/4 mile in length—from mile zero to mile 1.5.

Where did we count?  We started with two hypotheses.  First, we assumed that only the most obnoxious trash tossers—and believe me there are definitely some trashy people out there—would jettison the can immediately into the driveway or front yard.  So we wanted to start our counts exactly on the edge of town, just past the last house.  Second, we assumed that beer cans would make up an interesting segment of our data and we wanted to be in a position to count them.  With the exception of the state liquor agency—where microbrews can be purchased at $3 per can—there are just two places to buy beer between Cedar City and Beaver, a distance of 54 miles.  So, we wanted to begin our counts along sections of road that were directly accessible to these two vendors.  Based on this pair of hypotheses, we chose to start counting cans at two locations.  The first was on the north side of town on a paved county road starting almost adjacent to the TA truck stop (one of the beer sellers).  The second was along old Highway 91—the former road to Las Vegas before the interstate was constructed.  This highway leads directly away from the second beer vendor, Maverik—which is exactly 1.5 miles from the edge of town and the start of our data collection.

 

What we do not know.  At this point, we have no control.  That is, our preliminary experiments have been conducted without the benefit of baseline information.  We don't know what "normal" should be.  As a result, it is difficult to write authoritatively about our conclusions.  We also have no data on traffic levels.  Thus, we have no information regarding the percentage of trips that include trash tossing.  Does every driver throw a can, or is it one in 50?  On a related note, we have no way of knowing the age of the can.  So, we don't know if it has been lying in the ditch for two years or two months or two days.  Because of these problems, and many other missing pieces of information, our reader may be tempted to ask, "Why bother?"  Why bother publishing these data if you know nothing about them?  Because, as we believe our reader will agree, they are simply very interesting and very curious on their own.  So, without further ado, let us finish the prologue.  Our next post will address the first set of data.