Dumping trash in the desert is a problem. It’s not a new problem. Littering is so common it probably somehow predates litter itself , and for someone who came up in the age of ‘giving a hoot,’ something makes me extra irritated when I come across a giant pile of trash on a dirt road out in the desert.
Sometimes it’s just bags of regular garbage that someone has tossed on a dirt road. Maybe from a moving car, along with countless tiny bottles of Fireball or 99 Bananas. Those are easy enough to clean up, but it’s harder when the piles of trash include stuff like appliances, mattresses, and other junk that people know is a problem, but they just want to make it someone else’s problem.
When some desert residents find illegal piles of garbage on their morning walks, they go into sleuth mode and find stuff like mail or receipts that can lead them back to the person who’s junk it is in the first place. I love this type of content on instagram – I follow High Desert Dani and the Desert Cleanse Project, Blight Sights, Desert Balloon Project, Johnson Valley Painted Rocks – there’s a lot of good desert defender content out there if you know where to start looking. But sometimes the trash that’s found was dumped by an unscrupulous business owner trying to skirt the dump fees and save a few bucks on an underbid job. With spring on its way and spring cleaning being an actual thing, how can you know that the landscaper or handyperson you’ve hired is actually taking your stuff to the landfill?
I called Joe Cole from “Papa Joe’s Tractor Works” and talked with him about the work he does with his tractor and trailer, a business he started up in 2021.
Joe: “I do a lot of the jobs where people call and the mustard grass just sort of took over. In a few weeks that stuff can grow up to three and four feet tall. It’s a little bit of everything, you know. I like money so if I can find a way to viably make it work into what I have time to do then I usually try and help people out.“
I can respect that. I can also respect Joe’s love of the desert. He’s living what I would define as the desert dream: on land adjacent to hundreds of acres of open BLM desert.
Joe: “It’s beautiful… I’ve been coming out here since I was a kid. There’s beauty in the desert that people just don’t realize. We had a mountain lion on our property at one point, which was interesting. I lost a whole bunch of chickens that night.
“We get quite the amount of wildlife and it’s interesting to watch.
“I spend thousands of dollars a year cleaning illegal dump sites and you’d be amazed how many people just go out there and all of a sudden ‘oh look there’s a pile of trash down the dirt road.’ It’s like… why would you dump it in the middle of the dirt road?
“Why would you dump it out in the desert at all?”
When he’s not cleaning up trash for free, he charges for it, too. Joe says that when he hauls refuse to the spots like the Landers landfill, he keeps receipts and shows them to the client. It’s part of the invoice and part of the job.
Joe: “Sometimes people think ‘this person is way cheaper than your estimate…’ I understand that but I have insurance and I have a company name that I can’t afford for people to go ‘oh he goes and dumps in the desert!’”
Joe says that no matter who you hire, if you want to make sure the stuff you are paying someone to haul off actually makes it to the dump, you gotta ask for those receipts.
Joe: “You need to always ask for receipts. I like to put people’s minds at ease and show receipts. There’s a lot of guys that do it right, but unfortunately there’s a lot more that do it wrong. Remember that the cheapest guy isn’t always going to do it right.”
There are always a few desert clean-ups brewing. The desert is wide and vast and has many beautiful places where you can toss a refrigerator off the back of your truck. But if you do, you better hope that there isn’t a piece of mail stuck in the radiator fins of that old refrigerator. Because the person that finds that refrigerator and that piece of mail might have an Instagram or Facebook account, and they may not let your transgression go quietly into the desert night.
If you need something hauled off, or a guy that’s handy with a tractor and can work on your driveway, yard, or other spring cleaning project, give Papa Joe’s Tractor Works a call at 442-205-8389.
Save the date for a cleanup happening April 5th and 6th in Joshua Tree.
