Answer Man: Who dumped a load of trash at Hominy Creek Greenway parking lot and why?

This question stinks, figuratively.

It comes from a picture posted online of a bunch of garbage posted in a parking lot. It also raises a pretty important question about what we're doing to protect our greens paces and rivers.

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Question: Photos of garbage dumped in the Hominy Creek Greenway parking lot were circulating Monday on social media. Did WastePro really dump this garbage there? If so, why? And will they be charged with felony littering? I think that is land owned by the city, isn’t it?

Answer: You can almost smell the photo in question.

It's a trailing gob of everyday trash piled on a city-of-Asheville-owned parking lot at the intersection of of Hominy Creek Road and Shelburne Road. That lot is also at the entrance to the Hominy Creek Greenway and Hominy Creek itself.

The photo was taken by Carolina Public Press contributing environmental reporter and founding trustee of the Friends of Hominy Creek Greenway Jack Igelman.

This work along with the fact he's been a resident of West Asheville since 1999 means Igelman has a vested and vocal interest in keeping greenways and waterways litter free.

"Trash management beyond the boundary of the @buncombeGov transfer station in West Asheville is a mounting problem," Igelman tweeted Dec. 19 along with the picutre. "The truck driver unloaded in the Hominy Creek Greenway lot due to a lithium battery fire after being denied entry to the dump."

That was the story a pair of gentlemen sitting in a truck told Igelman when he asked what was going on.

He told the story of that encounter a few days after it happened.

"I was like, 'Who Are y'all?' and they said, 'We are the drivers in the truck.' And I was like, 'Oh, all right. So like, what what happened?' And the story that they gave me, which I haven't confirmed is that they had a fire in the back of their truck and he the driver claimed ... it was from a lithium battery in the trash."

Furthermore, Igelman said then men told him, because of the fire they were barred from getting into the nearby Buncombe County Transfer Station at 190 Hominy Creek Road.

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All this happened at around 1 p.m. in the afternoon. Igelman said he made a call to city of Asheville Parks and Recreation about the trash and when he went by the parking lot again around 5 p.m., it was being cleaned up.

Citizen Times reached out to city of Asheville to figure out what happened and how the situation was addressed.

Spokesperson Kim Miller emailed back Dec. 20 and provided more details along with confirmation of Igelman and the truck driver's stories, courtesy of the Asheville Public Works Department.

"A Waste Pro truck was transporting its load to the transfer station," she said. "It was there that workers noticed the load in the Waste Pro truck appeared to be smoldering. As per protocol, the Waste Pro truck quickly found a safe place to unload."

She noted that a someone transferring waste "cannot unload something like that at the transfer station due to the potential of creating a larger fire etc."

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Once the bags were offloaded and it was determined the materials were non-threatening, Miller said, Waste Pro removed the material, cleaning the area "as quickly as deemed safe."

Then the city pitched in, too.

"This morning, city sweepers went to the area in which the material was unloaded to clear away any small debris that may have been left on the surface," Miller said in the Dec. 20 email. "Waste Pro then sent power washers to the area, diluting any potential pollutant that could enter wash into a stream."

She sent a picture of the lot, slick after the cleaning, no trash in site.

A dumping crime?

Was this felony littering?

It's tough to say.

North Carolina law prohibits littering thusly: " No person, including any firm, organization, private corporation, or governing body, agents or employees of any municipal corporation shall intentionally or recklessly throw, scatter, spill or place or intentionally or recklessly cause to be blown, scattered, spilled, thrown or placed or otherwise dispose of any litter upon any public property or private property not owned by the person within this State or in the waters of this State including any public highway, public park, lake, river, ocean, beach, campground, forestland, recreational area, trailer park, highway, road, street or alley."

There are a few exceptions, but they are beside the point here.

Insofar as penalties, that depends on weight. Littering becomes a felony after 500 lbs. and you get slapped with at most a $300 fine and community service, should the court so deem.

Again, it's difficult to know how much the Hominy Creek Parking lot trash weighed. But the question of whether the dumping was punishable runs up against best practice in the waste service industry.

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report published July 2021 titled "An Analysis of Lithium-ion Battery Fires inWaste Management and Recycling" makes pretty clear reference to that best practice.

"(T)he standard protocol for haulers is to find a safe location to dump the burning trash and wait for the fire department to arrive and extinguish the fire," that report notes on page 8. It notes several true-to-life and rather recent instances of haulers having to do just that.

So, in the end, it seems like safety was prioritized and protocol was followed at the Hominy Creek Greenway parking Lot.

'There is a social cost'

That doesn't mean there isn't a larger issue and a bigger lesson to be gleaned from Igelman's picture.

"I think the response was good," Igelman said. "The reason I decided to tweet it out was just rising, growing concern with the management of the periphery of that facility."

The county is getting much busier and there may soon be a need for another dump. That's what Igelman said, but it's not just his perspective, it's something Buncombe County government is looking at very seriously right now.

Sept. 16 Buncombe's Environmental & Energy Stewardship Subcommittee heard a presentation on a recent trash management survey. Of nearly 950 respondents spread throughout the county, it found 42% were Waste Pro subscribers, 16% were municipal residents and another 42% were neither, living in unincorporated areas and unsubscribed from Waste Pro.

Based on this and other feedback, the committee has established a handful of question-based goals, which they dissected during the Sept. 16 meeting. The first dovetails cleanly with Igelman's concern.

"How can we reduce traffic at the transfer station?" the committee pondered. It queried survey respondents on this matter, trying to understand why they used the transfer station in the first place.

Some cited bad experiences with Waste Pro or lack of service for bulky item pickup.

The committee fielded numerous options including changes in how the solid waste collection fee is collected, how to advertise the bulky pick-up program better and how to improve the county's contract with waste collection services.

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This conversation looked at the bigger picture of how to increase and adapt waste collection services to the times.

Igelman, speaking specifically of the transfer station, said he thinks better enforcement is due. "I think they need more oversight of what's happening outside," he said. "I think we need more enforcement of the rules right there to ensure people are covering their trucks."

Companies, he added, could either train their drivers or have some teeth if drivers aren't following the rules.

There's also a looming issue of keeping up with residents, he added.

"Our city, we're just outpacing the resources our city and county has to deal with things," Igelman said. "And that is obviously just a problem of deep scarcity that we're we're facing."

Access is key, according to Asheville GreenWorks executive director Dawn Chávez.

"The transfer station is has seen such an uptick in use ... because it's convenient and the county landfill is so far out there that you know, some people I've talked to they're like, "I have to plan a whole day trip if I'm going to drop something off,'" Chávez said.

But, she added, adding another drop-off location closer to everyone is difficult, too.

"People want convenience, but and then nobody wants a transfer station like in your backyard, either.

One of Greenworks Trash Trout debris-catching devices is very near where the trash was dumped in the parking lot, Chávez noted.

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"We get a lot of trash in that in that one," she said. "And it's a bigger one than our juniors because of the amount of volume that's coming through."

People and companies alike need to be more mindful, but warning and education can only go so far. Chávez said Greenworks calls law enforcement about illegal dumping only to be told "they're not going to pursue it."

"When there's no enforcement, people just do whatever they feel like doing."

Igelman called himself a "squeaky wheel" when it comes to protecting the Hominy Creek and its surroundings. He, like Greenworks calls to law enforcement, is the guy that makes calls to Waste Pro and the transfer station when he sees a problem.

Others can do so, too, he said.

"What you might think would be a small, stupid issue might be part of a larger systemic problem, which is what this is, right?" he said. "It's just there is this social cost of trash management and we're kind of seeing it right in that corner."

Andrew Jones is an investigative reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at @arjonesreports on Facebook and Twitter, 828-226-6203 or arjones@citizentimes.com. Please help support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Asheville parking lot trash dump a crime? Harmful to Hominy Creek?