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Man caught living for 8 years among half-ton of trash in national forest, feds say
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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I guess "1000lbs of trash" doesn't sound as bad as "half a ton"?
That's like, maybe 1-2 months of household, curbside waste for an average family. This dude was living there for 8 years.
If he was there for 8 years, that means he was paying taxes into the system for 40 years before he nope'd out and headed to the woods, which his taxes paid for.
And this is what he gets in return. Tsk tsk.
He'd accumulated this pile during 2 years at this site, so he's left similar messes in several other places. And he's got a long history of careless fires, like leaving them burning, even at the height of fire season. And he's got an SUV, so it's not like he couldn't have taken his trash out.
"The trash consisted of tires, plastic bags. trash bags, aluminum cans and other items of trash. I observed a canopy structure for his sport utility vehicle. The canopy structure was being utilized as a car port.”
Gatz, who is 65 years-old, according to public records, also had a fireplace with “active embers and a cooking station with 10-12 frying pans,” as well as “[d]ebris [that] consisted of three ladders, six to eight totes overfilled with debris… five black 55-gallon drums… eight tires, four bike frames, five gallons of motor oil, plywood, and other miscellaneous lumber around the campsite,”
That's not necessary stuff, it's a wildfire waiting to happen.
Actually, a lot of that sounds pretty practical.
The barrels would work as slow burn barrels for long term heat on cold nights, the bike parts could be a source of income (part bikes > full bikes to sell), more than 2 pans seems too many, but he may go through them fast if used over an open fire (depending on the type of pan), for millennia campers kept fires buring over night or for days to make cooking later easier (yes it's risky in some situations, but practical in general), and covering his car would ensure it looked cleaner and required lower maintenance (both have a lot of perks for a homeless person trying to live cheaply and fly under the radar). I'm not sure about the tires, but keeping cans and some other materials can def provide a source of income.
Nothing is ever really disposable, except the abusive people in your life. We could all benefit from less of those. Everything else is reusable or recyclable. Just listing this guys possessions without explanations for them makes them easy to dismiss as trash, but that isn't necessarily even close to honest. He likely had some actual waste on site from food prep or completed projects, but by no means was all his stuff trash.
Still a fire hazard. No open flames are supposed to be burning during high fire danger alerts and leaving an open fire burning unattended is taboo anytime, since we now have reliable means of starting a fire when needed. Climate change has made wildfires worse but even in the Old West they were a frequent cause of death.
Did you know that at the current rate of increase in homelessness, half the country will be homeless in ten years? The fastest growing demographics are people over 50, children without families and Latino/Hispanic populations.
Half the country is 115 million people. This is going to keep happening at a larger scale. Shelters are full.
On one small good, the fastest shrinking homeless populations are veterans and children with families
I'm sorry, WHAT?
What, you don't weigh all your trash in your trash scale at home? /s
More shocked at the amount of waste Americans generate.
Yeah it's fucking gross. We could literally just make a very few tweaks for everything to be more sustainable but that would piss off the rich fucks who benefit from the exploitation
4.9 lb/day x 4 people x 30 days = 588 lbs, so really not that far off.
https://govfacts.org/housing-infrastructure/solid-waste-management/waste-collection-disposal/where-americas-waste-goes/
Uhhh, 1-2 months?!? It’s just two of us in our household, but we usually don’t fill one 45L kitchen trash bag every two weeks by the time trash pickup comes. So probably 15lbs every two weeks? So about 60lbs every two months. It would be unfathomable to produce 1000lbs in two months.
My SO and I fill a 30L trash bag every two weeks, and our recycling is usually filled faster as there's so much paper/cardboard packaging on everything, plus we favor food stuff sold in recycable containers.
Our recycling basically goes out every week, as the two bins are smaller than our trash can, but our trash can usually goes out less and with one or two bags in it... We'd wait, but it's hot outside and we don't want to leave it there boiling and rotting for weeks.
is that a standard white kitchen bag that is a bit smaller than a black outdoor can liner? If so my wife and I are doing horribly. Its more than one a week and closer to two. That is with seperating recycling so if you include recycling we fill a super large contract type bag every week. Granted the recycling company instructs to not crush things because I believe they want to jack up the money they get.
Yeah, the standard white bag. We produce probably a bit less than normal blue bag of recycling a week. But basically all our food scraps go into either our own compost or the city compost, so we fill up a lot of compost bags. We also flatten our cardboard and tie it in a stack, so that cuts down on the volume a lot.
ah yeah. our city does not compost and we don't have something to do it. We flatten cardboard as that is the one thing the recycling company allows. Yeah compost would reduce it a lot.
One pickup load of trash, or what everybody who doesn't pay for trash service accumulates before driving it to the dump for $10.
Either he's hauling his trash out or he's extremely good at eliminating waste.
(He was there for 2 years)
Having been homeless and lived in a forest, you really don't create much trash. Depends I guess, but you just don't consume much when you're broke and living in a tent outside of society.
Great for the waistline too. Lots of outdoors activity and a perpetual caloric deficit.
I'd put money on him dumping it in a ravine nearby that they haven't found yet