July 28, 2008
Opinion
Discarded bottles and cans can be death traps for small animals
Empty cans and bottles — you see them along the sides of roads. Some get picked up by people who need some extra income from the deposits. But a nickel per container is very low pay for the effort.
Oregon needs to raise the deposit, with part of it being used to fund return centers.
I would favor a 25-cent deposit, with 20 cents being returned to the consumer, 1 cent going to the grocery store for managing the deposits and 4 cents going to the return centers to defray their expenses. The return centers can rinse the cans and sort the glass by color for recycling.
A single neighborhood return center could accept all brands, so you would not need to travel to multiple stores to recover your deposit money. A rural store more than 10 miles from the nearest return center could function as its own return center.
But that’s not why I’m writing. Oregon does have a bottle bill, and it has crews picking up all sorts of trash along the major roads — and this is a big plus. Before I moved to Oregon in 1983, I lived in New Mexico, where neither existed, and there were literally tons of empty cans and bottles along the roadsides. Not only was it ugly, but it was a waste of materials — civilization cannot survive indefinitely if we continue to discard and bury our resources.
But that’s still not my point. No, what motivated this article was finding an empty and unbroken miniature wine bottle at the edge of the A-1 channel in the West Eugene Wetlands.
I’m trying to design some special habitats for the Western pond turtle, which has declined in the Willamette Valley to roughly 1 percent of its prehistoric numbers. The pond turtle will disappear soon from the wetlands unless nesting and juvenile habitats are created and protected.
So I have been spending a lot of time walking along the west Eugene watercourses — the branches and diversions of Amazon Creek that are mostly channelized and mainly function as storm sewers. On each hike, I would pick up a beer can or two, or an unbroken bottle. As a child I developed a hatred for broken glass — it cut my bare feet and my bicycle tires.
Because the little wine bottle was not broken, I picked it up and removed it. My motivation was increased when I saw that it contained a large number of beetles.
No, I did not want the beetles. But I did want to see how many had died in the bottle.
In my office at home, I dumped out the contents and found the following arthropods: 25 carabid beetles plus many parts, including the head capsules of another 14; at least four isopods (pill bugs); one hemipteran (a true bug); one ant, and 32 mites (possibly passengers on the 39 carabid beetles). Quite a haul in one little bottle.
So why were they in there? The odor of wine, and later the odor of dead beetles, may have attracted them — but evidently once they crawled in, the sloping glass surface was too slick for them to climb back out, and these nocturnal animals either starved or cooked when the sun made a greenhouse of the bottle.
That little wine bottle is not unique. I have picked up many empty cans and bottles that contained the expired remains of small animals. In forested areas, cans and bottles often will contain snail shells. These are native snails, not the kind that live in your garden, that may have been attracted to the yeasty odor of beer. And when they get into beer, they lose their traction and cannot get out. Others snails may die in dry cans because they get hot and the way out goes into the daylight. At any rate, discarded cans and bottles in natural areas can take a real toll on native mollusks, part of our forest ecosystem.
Small vertebrates are among the animals I have found trapped in empty cans and bottles. Back in 1996, a beer can at the edge of a logging road in the Coast Range contained a couple of drowned shrews. Apparently, some rainwater had accumulated in the can and then the shrews fell in, could not climb up the slick sides, and drowned.
Empty cans and bottles out in natural areas are deadly traps for all sorts of small animals.
So the next time you are out hiking and you see an empty can or bottle, don’t just think of the deposit. Don’t just think of removing some ugly rubbish from a beautiful area. Don’t just think of removing a bottle before it gets broken.
Think of the little animals that could die in that container if you don’t pick it up.
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