A gray Toyota pulls away from an East Oakland road, leaving behind dozens of trash bags stuffed with oily food wrappers, burned clothes and a line of disassembled car parts.
“What a disrespectful jerk!” people might think. They would be wrong.
Instead, the pile of trash was courtesy of Andy Wang, an unassuming Livermore engineer who just spent an hour collecting, sorting and bagging thousands of pieces of trash that littered the street earlier that day. The haul is about to be picked up by Oakland Public Works, which will properly dispose of the refuse.
Wang, who works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, spends his evenings and weekends collecting trash at some of Oakland’s illegal dumping sites — spots where residents, businesses and construction companies improperly leave heaps of trash. Across the Bay Area, hundreds of sidewalks, highway overpasses and small patches of grass have become miniature open-air landfills. It’s a lot for city trash haulers to keep up with.
Work by dozens of volunteers like Wang “makes our lives much easier,” said Kristin Hathaway, assistant director for public works in Oakland. According to Hathaway, the department saw a spike in illegal dumping during the pandemic. The problem is especially acute, she said, in the city’s “disadvantaged frontline communities.”
Illegal dumping can lead to contamination of creeks and clogged storm drains, which exacerbates flooding during the rainy season, Hathaway said. More plainly, accumulating trash creates a negative experience for residents: “We don’t want residents and kids having to walk by piles of illegal dumping trash,” she said.
Although recent data shows that illegal dumping has trended downward from 2021 to 2023, identifying and containing the source of illegal dumping remains a difficult task for city staff. Oakland’s illegal waste comes from a variety of sources — residences, businesses, construction sites, among others — and the issue may be worse in some areas, despite overall improvements citywide, Hathaway said.
Through his cleanups, Wang has developed a strong relationship with the city workers and hopes that by helping out with a few hotspot dumping sites, he can give the department time and resources to focus on other priorities.
Wang got his start during the pandemic, a time in which he “just didn’t really have much to do,” he said. After coming across online videos of other good samaritans unclogging storm drains and cleaning polluted rivers, Wang picked up a pair of trash grabbers and began to “beautify” truck stops along the Altamont Pass — a stretch of Interstate 580 between Livermore, where he lives, and Tracy.
For Wang, cleaning up trash is “therapeutic” and helps him decompress. It also provides a dose of instant gratification. “Throughout the day, I work as a programmer and an engineer, so I don’t see results until months later,” Wang said. “But with cleaning, I see the difference I’m making an hour later.”
Since the pandemic, Wang has gained an extensive social media following on Reddit and Instagram, where he posts oddly satisfying time-lapses of his clean-ups.
Wang began posting to expose the severity of illegal dumping, but, more importantly, to demonstrate how “one person can make a huge difference.” He buys all of his own supplies, conducts cleanups by himself and — although a truck would make his life easier — drives a mid-size sedan to make the point that anyone can help pick up trash.
Oakland Public Works coordinates with over 100 volunteers and dozens of organizations enrolled in its “Adopt a Spot” program — an initiative that provides tools and resources to those who “adopt” an area in the city to clean.
The department implemented an illegal dumping surveillance camera program in March 2022, placing 16 cameras at illegal dumping hotspots around the city. Public Works noticed significant “cooling” of illegal dumping in locations where cameras were placed, Hathaway said. “You have to punish the people who are dumping and alleviate some of the distress that it’s causing to the residents of the city.” Between March 2022 and February 2023, the cameras captured 492 illegal dumping incidents. City officials estimated that the cameras allowed Public Works to issue citations to roughly 20% of these incidents.
Depending on the situation, illegal dumpers and litterers may face administrative citations or civil penalties, resulting in fines of up to $1,000 per violation — potentially more for repeat offenders.
But for Wang, illegal dumping is “an issue that can’t really be solved with punishment.”
Wang started zip-tying his own makeshift educational resource guides — flyers that provide QR codes to the city’s waste management programs — to “No dumping” signs, and hopes to collect data about whether these “alternative” signs dissuade illegal dumping. At least in the beginning, he’s noticed a drop in trash in these areas.
“Giving people an alternative choice, it’ll make them think a little more about their actions before they do it,” Wang said.
For John Medlock Jr., deputy director of the Alameda County Public Works Agency, efforts to reduce illegal dumping need to focus on holding people accountable and enforcing existing laws. While volunteers like Wang provide temporary fixes, local neighborhood cleanups do not solve the larger issue and trash will continue to pile up, Medlock said.
But for Wang, the root of the illegal dumping problem — even with institutional and political challenges — starts “from the people.”
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“We are paying for our own actions,” Wang said. “We have to do what we preach and it’s just really humbling to see that I am inspiring more action.”
And humble Wang is. “Andy is just a force of light,” said Richard Shirk, an organizer behind the Trash Falcons — a group of Oakland residents who spend their Sunday mornings cleaning up Lake Merritt.
“I think people are so used to having to ask permission to do anything,” Shirk said. “There’s a huge lightbulb moment when people realize that they can just get a bunch of friends together, get some trash grabbers, get some trash bags and then make it happen.”
