After 25 years of looking after the local environment as a bushcare volunteer, Marcia Nielson is understandably a bit connected to her local patch of bushland.
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So she’s more than a little bit upset than some environmental vandal, or vandals, is continuing to dump plastic bags containing dog poo in the tree-filled reserve on Foothills Rd at Corrimal.
Ms Nielson is not just concerned about the dog poo itself, but the plastic bags surrounding it that may be the worse pollutant. And she finds it just a bit strange.
“You can’t believe people would go to all the trouble of putting in a plastic bag just to dump it, can you?” she said.
“I just find it bizarre.”
Ms Nielson, a carer, started noticing the bags appearing last summer.
“I can remember I couldn’t get close to the bags because of all the blowflies,” she said.
As a keen bush care volunteer she has disposed of the plastic bags whenever she can, and estimates she has picked up about 50 of them.
“I pick them up on the end of a stick and put them in the bin just before the bin’s about to be emptied. But I’m just a bit over having to do it.
“You should see the blowflies in summer – it's just putrid. It’s so bad.”
Perhaps emboldened by getting away with it, it seems they have established a habit in the time since then, leading Ms Nielson to conclude that it’s most likely to be the work of a single dumper.
“Yep, I’m pretty sure it’s the same person,” she said.
“It’s all in the same spot, all neatly tied up in the bags.”
While the area is a popular place for dog walkers, the culprit(s) dumps the bags in the same place each time.
Now she’s had enough and came to the Mercury to blow the whistle on their filthy habit.
The level of deliberation in collecting the poo, tying it in bags, then dumping it in a public reserve is selfish to the extreme.
In terms of a longer-term solution, Ms Nielson said a public bin in the vicinity might help, but that could end up being a stinking heap of refuse and flies through the summer.
“I just want them to take the bags back to their own bin,” she said. “It’s your rubbish, put it in your bin.”