Last modified: Wednesday, May 7, 2008 1:53 AM EDT KESSLER: Score without volunteers, 1 big landfill The massive - and highly commendable - cleanup efforts undertaken last Saturday by hundreds of volunteers along the Ten Mile River in Attleboro and throughout the town in Mansfield got me thinking, specifically about why the annual cleanups are so vital. It was really a rhetorical thought, because it should be pretty obvious why those cleanups - and similar ones held in other area communities - are necessary: Way too much stuff gets dumped on the landscape. The real question is why that is. That answer is pretty obvious, too: There are too many slobs out there who not only don't care about the environment, but who really are saying they don't care about their fellow citizens when they dump their garbage along the road, in the river and in the woods. There is no other plausible explanation for those doing the cleanup along the Ten Mile River in Attleboro finding such items as a sink, a chair and three bicycles, which, as staff writer Rebecca Keister wrote in Sunday's report on the event in The Sun Chronicle, are not items naturally found in a river. "Yeah, and there was a whole bunch of other stuff," acknowledged Linda Alger, the city council administrative assistant who, in conjunction with the Friends of Attleboro Interested in Revitalization, organized the second annual cleanup along the trail running along the river. The volunteers, which included Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, high school students and dozens of citizens, worked hard, as did members of the Attleboro Land Trust when they held one of the regular cleanups at their city properties on the previous Saturday. But the city isn't the only place where odd things destined for the trash get unceremoniously dumped in the woods or a river. It was the same story in Mansfield on Saturday, for instance, during the inaugural Great Mansfield Cleanup. More than 1,200 people - 5 percent of the town - fanned out across the town, and items they found included a toilet in the woods off Stearns Avenue, staff writer Ted Nesi reported, 100 tires thrown behind Mansfield High School and, of course, the eyesores that are truly ubiquitous around the area: beer cans and water bottles. Mansfield hopes to seize the momentum generated by the Great Mansfield Cleanup by forming a town beautification commission that plans to launch a beautify Mansfield campaign similar to the Keep America Beautiful public service ads that aired in the '70s. That's great news for those who really care about the environment, but let me return to my earlier question of why these regular cleanups are necessary. It'd be easy to say people are slobs, lazy or uncaring, but the problem really goes beyond folks who toss cans and bottles out of their car, because the area is plagued with trash. I see garbage bags, cans, and bottles and other trash strewn along Cushman Road in North Attleboro where I jog, and recently an old toilet seat appeared on the grass at the side of the road. In addition, clothing items and furniture have been dumped there from time to time, along with people's household trash, including non-town garbage bags. I don't know what the answer is, or that there even is one. Littering is already illegal, as is the wholesale dumping of trash. But I do know that as long as people insist on treating the environment with such disregard, the trash problems will persist. In the meantime, thank the folks in your community who contribute to such cleanup efforts as those held over the weekend, because from what they've seen, and from what I see deposited on the roads, the volunteers are the only people standing in the way of our communities turning into one big ugly landfill. LARRY KESSLER (lkessler@thesunchronicle.com.) is a Sun Chronicle local news editor.