I Stopped A Gross Polluter and You Can Too
In the year 2019, on the doorstep of one of the most environmentally-conscious cities in the United States, there was a company whose plastic waste went unnoticed for years, possibly decades. Their fugitive garbage blanketed an adjacent State Park and clogged a rain channel draining into San Francisco Bay. That company was Frito-Lay — maker of every snack you’ve ever bought at a gas station.
Part 1:
In 2013, I started a new job at a company neighboring the chip maker after moving to the Bay Area from Chicago. At first, I was so awestruck by the sight of towering San Bruno Mountain (probably the smallest mountain in the world at just 1300' tall) that I didn’t notice much else. But when I stopped looking up and started looking down, I realized I was surrounded by plastic garbage.

At first I was convinced that surely someone would come clean it up soon. But by 2015, that someone never came, so I took it upon myself to fix it, and spent half a lunch break cleaning up everything I could. In just 30 minutes, I filled a 50-gallon garbage can with chip bags, packaging materials, shipping receipts and cardboard that had blown over the chainlink fence surrounding Frito-Lay.
It was finally clean!
Until June of 2016, that is. When the garbage was back in full-force:

Another cleanup begins. But this time, I wanted to try to stop it at the source, so I sent the above photos and several others to the Zone Supervisor who managed the Brisbane branch, along with a polite request to clean things up. She replied:
I will address with the team! So sorry all of our trash is flying all over the place! The Brisbane wind does get intense but no excuse for all that trash. I will forward to my operations manager so we can get a game plan in place to prevent this from happening in the future!
They promptly sent people out to clean up the litter piling up on their side of the fence — of which there was plenty — but anything more than a few feet beyond their fence they deemed someone else’s problem. And they did nothing about the actual source of the garbage.
With no changes after a full year, I went a step further and reached out to the County for help. A week after my initial email, I got a reply:
…I have not had time to get up there, but will soon. I have not forgotten about this complaint and will follow up again.
I waited a few days, then sent a follow-up note with some additional photos. Then I waited, and waited, and waited some more…
A year and a half later, in December of 2018, I was done waiting. Fueled by my frustration, and inspired by an article a friend posted on social media, I decided it was time to really step things up. So I grabbed my DSLR camera and got to work documenting the full extent of the situation:

Photos in hand, I took to social media:

As you can see, the response wasn’t exactly viral, but I wasn’t about to stop now. Somehow, someway, I was going to fix this. And so the cleanup expanded further outwards into San Bruno Mountain State Park.

On one damp afternoon on January 7, 2019, I was collecting fistfuls of chip bags from the park when I spotted one sticking out of the ground. As I pulled it from the mud, it became clear that this one was unlike the others: the design and color palette were all wrong, and, for some reason, Speedy Gonzales (the hispanic cartoon mouse of yore) was emblazoned on the front.

Finding minimal information online about the rare snack, I went straight to the source and inquired with Frito-Lay about its origin: “…Lay’s Salsa and Cheese 1995–1996.”
Nineteen ninety six. This chip bag was 23 years old. It could drive. It could vote. Its birth year was when Fox News was born, the Nintendo 64 was released, and the Dow closed above 6000 for the first time. At the time this bag was likely deposited here, I was 8.
I’m sure the bag lived a full life — keeping its contents fresh from the moment it was sealed to when it was opened — maybe a month. And now, here it sits in 2019, mostly intact. This was truly, as Daffy Duck might say, despicable.
If Frito-Lay’s litter had been piling up in the park for decades, as I now suspected, this was no longer a simple matter of cleaning up the neighborhood — this was disgusting, and deserving of real consequences. So with that in mind, I began contacting local journalists to see if I could escalate the story beyond just my friends and coworkers. And, just to be safe, I also filed a formal complaint with the City of Brisbane.
Two days later, on January 14, a reporter from the San Mateo Daily Journal called me and told me he would come out later that week to investigate. The day after that, a regulatory compliance officer from the City of Brisbane stopped by to do an inspection. After he initially went to Frito-Lay and found no issues (the rep only showed him their fenced-in property), he called me, and I told him to let me show him around. Two days later, the city issued a Notice of Violation to Frito-Lay, giving them 10 days to clean up each and every chip bag.
And that following Monday, on January 21, Frito-Lay’s garbage was front page news:

Now we’re getting somewhere!
Over the course of the next few days, contractors came in and did a deep clean of the entire affected area. I watched as they filled numerous 50-gallon trash bags day after day. I’m not sure how much they found, but over the previous 3 weeks, I, alone, had filled four 32-gallon bags with a total of 50 pounds of soggy chip bags.

Following the cleanup, a few stray chip bags continued blowing over the fence, and I was wary this was all just another temporary fix. But a few months later, their dumpsters disappeared. They had moved them indoors and out of reach of Brisbane’s gusty winds. And, just like that, the stream of plastic garbage ceased.
Success! All is right with the world!
Not.
Part 2:
In April later that year, a friend living in Ann Arbor, Michigan messaged me on Facebook. She was driving home from work when she noticed something she hadn’t before: there was a Frito-Lay facility along her commute. And guess what — it was littered with plastic garbage:

And while the problem didn’t appear to be on the same scale as the Brisbane location, my friend was easily able to find numerous chip bags that had escaped the open dumpsters and taken up residence in the adjacent natural area. Many had been exposed to the elements long enough that their colors had bleached off, their various plastic and aluminum layers were separating, and organic material was piling up on top of them.

For the topographically impaired among you, San Francisco is 2300 miles from Ann Arbor. Thirty five hours by car through 9 states. Which got me thinking: just how many of these facilities are there? Did they all have plastic trash spewing out of their dumpsters? Well, as it turns out, there are at least 7 within a 2-hour drive of San Francisco, so I decided to find out.







Chip bags, chip bags everywhere. There was a Funyuns bag in Manteca with a plant growing through it. In West Sacramento, a rodent had made a Cheetos bag into a welcome mat. And while none of the sites I visited were as bad as Brisbane, there are upwards of 30 of these facilities in California alone. And another dozen in Michigan. How many of them look like the ones above? How many look like Brisbane? How many are worse?
Now, I’m mostly certain Frito-Lay isn’t purposely spewing branded perma-garbage everywhere as part of some evil marketing campaign, but I struggle to find another reason that waste management seems to be so hard for them.
This, after all, is the same company that sold SunChips in 100% compostable bags some 10 years ago. Though they promptly abandoned those bags, and nowadays simply encourage their customers to TerraCycle — where you collect all your chip bags and bring them to a drop-off center for recycling. Which is great, recycle everything! The problem being that even if every single consumer had TerraCycled 100% of their chip bags, each and every chip bag I had found throughout this ordeal would’ve still been there.
Every bag you have seen in this article never made it into the hands of a hungry customer. The blame for their existence as litter lies solely on Frito-Lay. And, while chip bags (and all lightweight packaging) are professional escape artists eager to be whisked away from an open dumpster or overflowing trash can by the slightest breeze, that’s no excuse. During all of this, I saw plenty of Ziplocs, Saran Wrap and Styrofoam too, but I’m shocked by how ubiquitous the bright, shiny chip bags are. Just about anywhere I find litter, there’s a Frito-Lay’s bag.

Solutions range from mandating that dumpsters and garbage cans automatically latch closed when not in use, to taxing any product sold or shipped in non-recyclable or non-biodegradable packaging. Maybe even creating a small government task force to proactively track down the culprits behind litter-filled hotspots. But those solutions all mean navigating through a bureaucratic rigamarole filled with red tape and legalese — and I once got so frustrated trying to do my own taxes that, by the time I finished the federal forms, I completely forgot to file state.
When I started picking up chip bags back in 2015, I never thought I’d be reporting what is possibly the largest snack food distributor in the world to the authorities, nor wind up on the front page of a newspaper — after all, my typical lunch break involves a car magazine, a skateboard, and a PB&J — but Brisbane is a little bit cleaner now, and, clearly, there’s much more work to be done.
If you’re usually distracted — whether by mountain or cell phone — I hope that the next time you’re out, you’ll really take in your surroundings. And know that, if you see exorbitant amounts of garbage near your home, office or elsewhere, fixing it doesn’t require new laws or government agencies. It can be as simple as taking some photos and writing an email or two.
Maybe I’ll surprise myself again and go further still in the fight against plastic pollution, but even if I can’t get a law passed taxing non-recyclable packaging, convincing a stranger on the internet to surprise themselves a little works too.
If you would like to help, please take a minute to search “Frito-Lay” in Google Maps near you. If there’s a facility close by, scope it out! And if you find Lay’s-branded garbage, take some photos and send them over. (*Pro-tip: search the area downwind of the building) And if you see anything as egregious as what I saw in Brisbane (Frito-Lay or otherwise), please report it!