With the coming of spring, the sides of the Glenn Highway and other areas are again strewn with tons of disgusting garbage. I once found it incomprehensible that humans could produce such prodigious quantities of detritus until an Anchorage Landfill official informed me that most of the material comes from vehicles with improperly covered loads. I figured the only other way this amount of trash could be produced every year is if instead of making crop circles in the U.K. for entertainment, space aliens put their "trash replicators" on maximum and whiz along our highways at night making light-speed deposits.
Aside from higher litter fines, we need to use technology to combat this annual onslaught. I propose adapting radio frequency identification tag (RFID) technology to cover an entire piece of trash, perhaps by some kind of irradiation, so that any portion of the trash can be traced back to the person or entity (company) that purchased it.
And if it is coming from space aliens, we need to work on that as well.
— Frank E. Baker
Eagle River