Investigators look for clues to litterers, who can make water undrinkable and kill wildlife.

By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Pizza delivery boxes are not the standard smoking gun in a criminal investigation. But when you're one of three investigators for all of Travis County digging up environmental crimes of illegal trash dumping, you take what you can get.

Fishing out pizza boxes along with letters and receipts from the bottom of a trash pile and dusting for fingerprints on paint cans are among the tricks to cracking a case of illegal dumping. For all of its green glory, Austin and Travis County have waterways whose banks are littered with trash, much of it dumped intentionally out of sight, some of it just the accumulation of litter washed into the region's many watersheds.

Dumping has environmental consequences beyond being unsightly: A gallon of spilled motor oil can make as many as 1 million gallons of water undrinkable. Plastic bags can suffocate fish. Tossed batteries and computers contain heavy metals that can kill wildlife. Even dumping organic material such as leaves and grass cuttings can disrupt the amount of dissolved oxygen in waterways.

Read the entire article HERE [1].