Discussion: new category?

2 hours of rubbish walking. A new PR? :) Rubbish walking for me means picking up trash in the woods. Over the past few weeks I've collected 4 dozen golf balls in a tiny 4 acre patch of forest across the street. Its miles to the nearest course. The source seems to be one of the "rich folks'" houses at the top of a side reentrant. Why is hitting a bucket of balls into the woods not considered littering? Glad to hear you guys are recovering.

maybe throw them back through his windows ?

Rubbish walking was actually a category invented a long time ago when I was ill for a while and walking was all I could do. I never changed it when I got better! Yesterday was actually excellent.

Make that 6 dozen:

I think this constitutes a medium or large bucket of balls. Seems like some fraction of these must hit trees and bounce right back at the golfer.

you could really spook him if you were there at "drive time" and each time he hits one into the woods, throw one back, maybe make appropriate animal noises at the same time.

My mother lived next to a golf course, and liked to walk around the perimeter and collect their errant balls. She had quite a large collection of them, to no apparent purpose.

My grandfather used to do the same. He had a ball washer in the shed and many, many buckets of balls. He said he sold them for 10cents each back at the clubhouse. I just want them out of the woods. Anyone want these? Free to a good home, as long as you promise not to (deliberately :) leave them in the environment. Quality ranges from unblemished to "chewed up by a rhinoceros."

On the new film about how awful Donald Trump and golf courses for the super rich are there is a section about an old retired chap who lives in St Andrews and spends most of his spare time hunting in the gorse bushes for golf balls. He then takes them to the local charity shop where they can be sold. He has made something like 10,000 GBP for charity doing it! Pretty awesome.

Ah, good idea. I poked around for Balto city golf programs for youth, but only found Balto county programs (which hardly need charity). Maybe D.C. has something, but the effort of getting the balls down there wouldn't be worth the gasoline. There is a Salvation Army outlet shop nearby so I'll swing by there and see if they can sell them. My worry would be that the schmuck who lives above me would buy them and they'd end up back in the woods! Donating them to a driving range might at least keep them "off the streets."

I pulled a brand new tire out of the stream last weekend. I couldn't believe someone in my neighborhood would do that. Found out yesterday that it was someone renting a room in the house directly adjacent to where I found it. Apparently she bought a new SUV and that spare tire didn't fit, so naturally, she threw it in the stream. That's what you do with old tires, isn't it? I dragged it out and was rolling it to my house when another neighbor came out and we noticed it was an exact match for his jeep! The stream tire looked brand new, like it was an unused spare. So he traded his older spare for it and I took the old one to the county recycling center. They'll take 4 tires per household (per year I assume) for free and even help you unload. Its a whole 5 minute drive from the neighborhood. People can be incredibly lazy.

There's a spot I run through nearly every day that is consistently used as a dump. For the New Haven dump you have to prove you're a resident and get tickets to be able to use the dump, and the hours of the office you have to do that in are not good for people with full time jobs. So they just throw it over the wall onto the trail instead. That's what forests are for! Makes me really mad, but New Haven don't exactly make doing it properly easy.

Out in the Bay Area, we use those locations like forests and streams and highway underpasses and railway tracks and beaches and disused factories and city parks for storing unwanted people. The huge homeless population is my biggest gripe with the region. I don't think golf balls are worth worrying about.

I mostly agree with sgb in the overall picture, but in the micropicture hitting golf balls into the neighboring woods (or ocean if you live close by) is incredibly lazy/rude and constitutes littering. Unfortunately littering laws are generally not worth the appropriate authority's time to enforce/prosecute unless they actually see it occurring at a time when they can take action.

I have a small amount of sulfuric acid to get rid of. When I looked into the "proper" way to do it I was pointed to a website that says there is one day per year I can take it to a collection point, but they can't say what day of the year that will be! Streams are open 24/7 ;)

Do you have friends that work in a lab? They'll have access to the appropriate disposal routes :)

We had a Westie for quite a while that loved golf and lacrosse balls. Could snuff them out from the deepest weeds and was always returning with them during walks. Golf balls were the best to play with cause the casing would break as he played with it. Then the elastic band layers would start breaking in turn. A real thing to play with that played back. Great fun but we tried to keep him from puncturing the central rubber ball.

Re: sulfuric acid... get a body and combine in a bathtub. It works on TV.