In response to Bill Pardy’s letter about observing an unoccupied county car parked at Keystone Spit on Sept. 1, I’d like to thank you all for noting the fine work done by volunteers to help keep our Island County beaches clean!
I am the Island County employee who was at the spit that day, with five volunteers who were picking up litter at the spit under funding from the Department of Ecology, who paid for all costs, including equipment and bags you saw on the car, disposal of the trash, fuel for the vehicle, and my pay for coordinating the efforts. Since that day, I’ve also worked with a group of U.S. Navy officer volunteers from the Whidbey Island Mustang Association who have adopted that beach, and also a large group of employees from Shell Oil in Anacortes, who filled 15 large bags with trash and another two with recyclables.
Not only Keystone, but other state parks and Island County parks are cleaned up under this grant, at no expense to Island County. On the Fourth of July weekend, this grant paid for a large dumpster at Double Bluff county park, where several volunteers gathered the next day to clean the park of many hundreds of pounds of litter from the fireworks and other trash left over from those who were on the beach that weekend. When you go to our county or state parks and note how clean they are, you can thank these volunteers who for over 13 years have picked up litter on our beaches.
How is this litter pickup funded? Statewide litter and recycling programs outlined in RCW 70.93 are funded by the Waste Reduction, Recycling, and Litter Control Account. Funds in the account come from a tax on industries that sell, manufacture or distribute products and packaging that tend to become litter: food, tobacco, soft drinks, wine, beer, glass containers, etc. Passed with the original Model Litter Control Act in 1971, the tax is unique because it was businesses and industries who proposed the tax assessment on themselves.
The Model Litter Control Act came in response to proposals for a beverage container deposit law, or “bottle bill.” Bottle bills have appeared in Washington several times since the early 1970s but have never passed. Either the voters or the Legislature turned them down. The tax rate, which has not changed since 1971, is relatively small at .015 percent. This equates to $150 per $1 million of gross proceeds. The tax is broad-based and does not create any noticeable effect on consumer prices. In the late 1990s the tax generated between $5 million and $7 million per year.
I invite all of you to join the volunteers I work with, and if you will contact me, you can help keep our beautiful parks clean! If you regularly walk the beach, I can also provide you with litter bags and a method to dispose of these bags for free at the county transfer stations. My name is Scott Chase, and you can reach me at schase@wsu.edu. With your help, we can keep our county beaches beautiful for everyone to enjoy!
Scott Chase
WSU Extension
schase@wsu.edu
