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Most people aren’t too concerned with what happens to their recycling after they put it on the curb to be collected. However, we’ve been treated to a very notable exception in Portland, Oregon thanks to a man who says someone keeps putting giant jugs of urine into his bins.
It’s hard to envy the nature of the job sanitation workers sign up for every single time they hit the streets to pick up trash and recycling, as there’s no telling what awaits them inside the bags and bins that can produce some gag-inducing stenches and sights.
They can also contain some potentially dangerous substances no sane person would want to encounter in the line of duty—like a recycling bin filled with multiple bottles of human urine.
According to KATU, that’s the scenario some sanitation employees in Oregon have repeatedly encountered in a Portland neighborhood home to a man who’s struggling to figure out why someone decided to start dropping off bottles of urine in his recycling bins.
Alex Van Duyn says he was made aware of that strange development last September after attempting to figure out why his recycling wasn’t being collected before opening the lid of a bin that contained “a nice deposit of gallon-size bottles of urine” that were deemed a “biohazard” by the sanitation company that refused to pick them up.
That marked the first of a string of incidents that led to Van Duyn ultimately opting to stop putting his bins out in the first place, but the culprit simply started to target other neighbors who’ve befallen the same fate.
He told the outlet police informed him it wouldn’t be a crime if the urine ended up in a trash can, but it is apparently illegal to put bottles of pee into other people’s recycling bins; Van Duyn has captured grainy security footage of a man emerging from what appears to be a BMW dropping off the offending matter in the dead of night, but he has not been identified.
If you’re curious, the average person produces between 1.5 and two quarts of urine per day, which equates to between 10.5 and 14 per week. That amounts to around 2.6 to 3.5 gallons every seven days, and when you consider Van Duyn says the suspect typically deposits six gallon-sized bottles, it would appear they either have an accomplice or are staying exceptionally well hydrated.