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Where garbage goes to die

Trash found along the Lynnway near the site of the former Club Morgan. David Filipov/Globe Staff

On a dense stretch of undergrowth along the McGrath Highway in Somerville, a spatula, a coffee cup, and several jars of spices and seasonings cluttered the dust around a barely-used saucepan, as though someone had planned to make breakfast there weeks ago, then forgotten about it.

Along the rail bed that runs parallel to the Massachusetts Turnpike in Back Bay, a half-empty flask of Rémy Martin VSOP lay on a bed of discarded sandwich wrappers, its vanilla notes overpowered by the earthy odor of moldering lottery tickets.

And on a barren lot along Route 1A in Lynn, plastic bags like festival flags flew from the thorny branches of wild roses, heralding a macabre cornucopia: Gatorade bottles full of what might have been urine, a decapitated spray paint can, and a partially buried leather backpack that, unearthed, revealed a large, angry nest of red ants.

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These are the places where garbage goes to die. They are no-man’s lands where refuse accumulates into de facto dumps, forgotten in overgrown roadsides. They are everywhere. You just have to look for them.

When it’s visible and easy to reach, city and town public works crews eventually get to much of the litter — Mylar snack bags, Styrofoam cups, beer cans, and, maddeningly, empty spring water bottles. On state highways, MassDOT crews, inmate work details, or volunteers through programs like Adopt-A-Highway can be seen cleaning up roadside trash.

But what of the junk that’s left in hard-to-reach areas with murky property lines? That can be left to rot for weeks, months, sometimes years.

The rail bed along the Mass. Pike between the Yawkey commuter rail station and the Prudential Tunnel is one of those places. The refuse that accumulates is clearly visible from the inbound lanes of the Pike, prompting Robert Beech, who commutes from an office in Wellesley, to write in a recent e-mail, “The trash along this area is SO disgusting, I just find it difficult to believe it exists in our city.”

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Crews cleaned trash from train tracks that run parallel to Interstate 90 in Boston. Keolis Commuter Services

But until Keolis Commuter Services, which operates the MBTA commuter rail, sent work crews to pick up the trash on May 14 and 15, no one had cleaned the area “for a dozen years,” said spokeswoman Leslie Aun.

Keolis took over operation of the commuter rail in July 2014. Aun said the company wants to clean up the tracks, but its priority is repairs of problems that have been causing delays.

“At the end of the day, our contract is being paid by Massachusetts taxpayers. I think we’d all agree that there are far better uses for those resources instead of picking up beer cans and old tires,” Aun said. “Yes, we can clean up the trash today, but unless something changes there’s going to be more trash tomorrow.”

Indeed, just days after Keolis workers removed 1.8 tons of refuse along the railway, a Globe reporter found sandwich bags, discarded parking tickets, a huge black garbage back filled with something foul, and that bottle of cognac. Some of it had blown in from the roadway or Fenway Park, but clearly other waste had been missed by the crews.

Trash near the railway along Ipswich Street in the Back Bay. David Filipov

“My take is that the student residents use the cover of the dark of night to toss all their garbage over the fence onto the rail bed,” Beech remarked.

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The state Department of Environmental Protection sometimes helps municipalities set up cameras to catch illegal dumpers, “but not just a simple litterer,” said Katie Gronendyke, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs. “If it’s just litter blowing onto a certain area along the side of the highway or along the railroad tracks, that is an issue that has to be addressed by the landowner,” she said. “The local city or town could also help to push that landowner to address the mess through local ordinances.”

The badly littered area off Route 1A in Lynn, the former site of Club Morgan, is located on two lots, one owned for more than a decade by a Cambridge company, Bayside Mortgage LLC, said Joseph Matzkin, a lawyer for the owners. The City of Lynn, he said, has contacted the owners when the trash has become a problem.

“We are aware of the issues, we work with the city regularly, every year we do a major cleanup over there,” Matzkin said. “For whatever reason people feel this is a safe place to dump.”

Governor Charlie Baker has a plan to sell off vacant state-owned properties across Massachusetts that are “collecting weeds and trash, into opportunities for public good, including open space, housing, economic growth, and community development,” according to spokesman Billy Pitman.

The likeliest future of the cluttered stretch along McGrath Highway in Somerville is as a sliver of green on a roadway. It’s located on a section of Route 28 that MassDOT wants to remake as a boulevard.

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Told of the mess lurking in the underbrush — in addition to the unmade breakfast, as of Sunday there were bottles, the usual scratch lottery tickets, and a discarded Massachusetts license plate (45V T75 in case you were looking for it) — MassDOT spokesman Ryan Grannan-Doll said crews “have plans to remove litter from the stretch of McGrath Highway from Highland Avenue to the Cambridge line in the near future.”

Trash found on the side of the road in Somerville. David Filipov

Nice to know. But what do people who aren’t reporters do if they stumble onto stubborn trash?

Boston residents can dial 311, said Erica Mattison, legislative director of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, a nonprofit educational and advocacy organization. Direct messaging MassDOT on Twitter also works, she said.

And, of course, people could stop littering.


David Filipov can be reached at David.Filipov@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davidfilipov.