SYDNEY, Australia -- Caution: That crumpled beer can may be watching you.
Fed up with seeing its undeveloped urban fringe land used as a rubbish receptacle, one local city council is installing hidden cameras in bits of waste to catch illegal dumpers.
Using motion-sensitive, swiveling, infrared cameras -- some small enough to be hidden in beer cans -- the council hopes to catch dumpers in the act, or at least get their license plate numbers.
The wireless cameras transmit photos back to storage databases over the local GSM mobile phone network.
"I just got sick and tired of seeing all the dumping taking place here," said Brett Richardson, council environment protection officer for the shire of Sutherland, south of Sydney. "So I got the ball rolling."
For Richardson, the final straw came in 1999. In April of that year, a major hailstorm hit Sydney. Hailstones caused widespread damage to red clay tile roofing common in the city.
In the months afterwards, thousands of homes had their tiles replaced. A huge number of the old, broken tiles ended up dumped along Heathcote Road, a lonely area of isolated bushland crisscrossed by fire tracks south of urban Sydney, Richardson said.
Last year, 250 car bodies and nearly 750 tons of building and construction waste were pulled from the area during a major cleanup day. The illegal dump is located about 10 kilometers from the nearest major thoroughfare. It's so remote that brazen dumpers sometimes bring bulldozers to level vegetation to make more space.
Heathcote Road is believed to be the biggest illegal dumpsite in Australia. Ironically, it's located right next to the largest legal landfill in the Southern Hemisphere: Lucas Heights. Given that Lucas Heights charges for dumping, many trash haulers apparently seek to save money by dropping their rubbish off a few kilometers short, said George Curtis, spokesman for Southern Sydney Waste Board.
The waste board has helped fund the purchase of cameras for Sutherland Shire's trial run.
Proponents of the "dump-cam" hope the cameras will gain enough photographic evidence to gain at least one conviction against a dumper, which can then serve as an example to others, Curtis said. Fines for illegal dumping, depending on severity, can range up to US$100,000 or even higher.
If the Sutherland trial is a success, Curtis plans to rotate the cameras to other local councils to monitor their local dumping hot spots.
The miniature, robust cameras were originally developed for the Australian Customs Service. Each is about the size of a small flashlight. More than one will be deployed, Richardson said.
The council has spent about $16,000 buying the cameras, which will be tested for three months to see what they come up with. One problem, however, may be that the cameras themselves could attract thieves.
The risk is made higher by the fact that under Australia's privacy legislation, signs must be posted warning visitors that they may be under camera surveillance.
Clearly, attitudes toward illegal trash dumping have come a long way since 1969, when the film Alice's Restaurant came out. Early in the film, folk singer Arlo Guthrie confronts a dilemma: how to dispose of trash left over from a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner in Stockbridge, Mass.
Guthrie loads up his Volkswagen van, but finds the local dump closed. Undeterred, he does the expeditious thing -- given pre-1970, "Earth Day" environmental values. He dumps the trash on the side of the nearest country road.
Soon, pot-bellied local police chief William Obanhein smokes out Guthrie after finding an envelope addressed to Guthrie amid the garbage. The incident is viewed as a parody of local police's mundane concerns against the deeper and divisive national backdrop of the Vietnam War.
Times have changed. Officer Obie, who nearly had a coronary climbing down the roadside hill to find Arlo's envelope in 1969, would be proud.
