Union County illegal dumping arrests: what to know

I will never understand people who litter. I think most of us feel that way, honestly, but I mean it literally. I don't get it. And a case out of Union County this week might be the most extreme version of it I've seen in a while.

On August 1, Patch reported mattresses, furniture, and other items turned up dumped in a wooded area of Green Brook Park in Plainfield. Union County Police investigators identified a white Ford Transit van connected to the scene and charged Silvia Estrada, 29, of Plainfield, with illegal disposal and dumping on county property. The very next day, a patrol officer found furniture, garbage bags, and household items piled in and around a dumpster near the Warinanco Sports Complex in Roselle. A red Dodge Ram led investigators to Juan Xopa, 20, of Elizabeth, who now faces the same charges. Union County Commissioner Chair Joseph C. Bodek called the dumping disrespectful to the parks and the residents who use them, and said it places an unnecessary burden on county resources and taxpayers. A first conviction carries a fine of at least $2,500, plus community service and the cost of cleanup, with an extra $500 tacked on for violating the county ordinance.

I get it, in the sense that I understand the math. Paying a disposal fee for a mattress or a couch costs money. Driving it to a park in the middle of the night and walking away costs nothing, until it does. What I don't get is the part where none of that math seems to weigh against actually just doing the right thing.

This isn't new to me. It's been going on my whole life

You've seen it too, piled on the side of some random road, dumped in a random parking lot, scattered near a trailhead on a hike. At the end of the street I grew up on, people used to dump bottles and whatever else, and as a kid, it bothered me enough that I made cleaning it up my own Scouting project. That was a long time ago. I've been fighting some version of this fight for 33 years now, this time on my own front lawn. People toss cigarette butts and fast food wrappers there constantly, Wawa, Burger King, Starbucks, Dunkin', I've found all of them on my grass at one point or another. This week I found the strangest item yet: a pair of jeans. I still don't have a theory for that one.

A generation raised on one image, and a more complicated story than I knew

I'm old enough to remember the "Crying Indian" public service announcement, the one where an actor in Native American dress sheds a single tear as trash lands at his feet. It aired constantly when I was young, and for a lot of people my age, it's the image that comes to mind first when the subject of littering comes up. What I didn't fully know until I looked into it recently is that the ad has since been retired. Keep America Beautiful transferred the rights to the National Congress of American Indians in 2023, after acknowledging the ad stereotyped and misappropriated Native culture, and it later came out that the actor, Iron Eyes Cody, wasn't Native American at all. The message about litter still landed for a lot of us. The way it delivered that message clearly deserved a second look.

More recently, there's a scene from "Mad Men" that's stuck with me for a different reason. The Draper family finishes a picnic in the park, and as they get up to leave, they just shake out the blanket, letting all their trash scatter across the grass, and drive off like nothing happened. It's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch, a snapshot of a mindset that was apparently normal once. I'd like to think we've moved past that. Standing on my own front lawn most weeks, picking up someone else's coffee cup, I'm not always sure we have.

The worst version of all this, at least around here, shows up every summer at the Shore. Watch what some of these beaches look like after a huge weekend crowd packs up and leaves. I've written plenty this summer about how much this state depends on that tourism economy. I just wish more of the people cashing in on a perfect beach day understood that leaving it the way you found it isn't optional. I'll never understand the people who don't.