What to do when finding huge pieces of trash?

Question

When I'm out in the woods I often find huge pieces, like for example a car tire or even something bigger, or huge piles of trash. Of course I can't take that with me on my hike to bring it out.

What should I do then? I feel like this question can't be answered generally so let's narrow it down to Germany or other EU countries. Am I supposed to call the police?

Answer 1

In the UK you'd inform the council. This would be fly tipping and is actually illegal.

Report fly-tipping or illegal waste dumping

Fly-tipping is the illegal dumping of waste. You can report fly-tipping to the local council.

If it's only a tyre or something small scale they may or may not clean it up. Your probably best getting rid of it yourself. If it's on private land then it's the land owners responsibility. If I own x piece of land I'm well within my rights to leave a tyre on my own land.

If it's in a national park then their is likely laws protecting the natural environment. You can contact the park authority to clarify this. OS maps will tell you if your inside a national park or not.

Answer 2

Suggestion for Germany: tell the owner.

• The owner often has the strongest interest in having it cleaned up fast, because clean places tend to stay clean, but once someone dumped rubbish, others may add to it.
• The owner may know this already but may be waiting e.g. for the weather to be dry enough to haul it out by car/tractor without completely messing up the track.
• The owner can then decide to file a report with the police.

How to find the owner?

• Comunal and state owned forest sections may have little signs saying e.g. "city of whereever, forest section nnn, name of section of forest" [Do not confuse with the Waldrettungspunkt (forest rescue point) signs].
• Privately owned forest is more difficult, particularly as the sections can be quite small. The local hunter will usually know who owns which piece. The police can give you the phone number of the hunter (they do that all the time because of wildlife accidents).