GILROY—More than a century of flotsam and jetsam is headed to classrooms in a lesson-on-wheels aimed at students and a future awash in healthy streams and oceans.
Already dubbed the “World Famous Garbage Museum” by its creators, the exhibit and its eye-opening array of trash from streams—from antique wagon wheels to computers—had its official unveiling this week in Gilroy.
Organizers hope its messages will inform thousands and impact generations to come.
“It’s all about the kids,” said Herman Garcia, founder and president of Coastal Habitat Education & Environmental Restoration—better know as CHEER.
The Gilroy based conservation group designed and built the traveling garbage exhibit with donations and volunteers, including Steve Guerriero and Kerry White of TerraTroth, Jorge Ruiz of Monsoon Manufacturing and Recology South Valley. County.
They hope the cleverly designed and equipped trailer over the next year will bring urgent messages of conservation, habitat restoration and the dangers of pollution and dumping to students in at least 100 schools and colleges in four Central Coast counties.
Officially, the Rube Goldberg-ish contraption is called the CHEER Coastal Watershed Garbage Museum Mobile Education Unit.
It’s the latest manifestation of CHEER’s dedication to cleaning up coastal waterways and restoring riparian habitats and fisheries brought to near ruin by decades of dumping of pollutants and garbage and mismanagement by corporations, farmers, the homeless who camp along waterways, ranchers, agencies and just plain folks.
And it’s an eye-opener.
Arrayed on shelves, in tall, chicken wire cages and dangling from hooks and poles are cell phones and Panasonic video cameras, holiday plate settings and eight-track movies such as The Jungle Book, power tools and shovels and even a big leather easy chair.
Cages hold hundreds of aluminum soda and spray paint cans, plastic bottles, deadly Styrofoam and shoes. There’s a bicycle, a PlayStation, space heater, toys, computers an outdoor BBQ, a sink, antique milk can and a Volkswagen transmission.
“You name it and it’s here,” said volunteer Ruben Ruiz of Gilroy.
And as much as the wheeled museum can carry, it’s less than an iceberg-tip of what has been pulled from area waterways in the past year and what’s to come, according to Garcia.
Unseen are hundreds of mattresses, sofas, tables, bed frames, guns and shopping carts, more than 1,000 tires, pickup trucks, cars and boats – and fish traps and gillnets designed to illegally take steelhead trout and other fish.
Garcia said his group is fed up with the dumping and don’t want to see it continue – hence the outreach to the generation to whom care of inland and coastal waterways will be passed, he said.
“It has to stop now,” said Garcia. “In a little more than 100 years we have completely destroyed our natural resources. No more. No mas. It has to change.”
