Toxic Pollution and Trash
April 22, 2025

Where does hurricane waste go? We tracked it with Air Tags to find out – the Washington Post
Excerpt:
The small 1.54-square-mile Treasure Island would produce over 128,000 cubic yards of debris after the storms — roughly 2 million standard kitchen trash bags worth of waste…
Days after the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck Florida’s Gulf Coast last fall, piles of waste and debris walled the streets of this community.
Furniture, appliances and family pictures were dumped onto the street after the first system’s storm surge washed waist-high seawater through the barrier island. The second hurricane struck just two weeks later, compounding the cleanup effort and further contaminating and soaking through crumbling piles of debris.
The small 1.54-square-mile island would produce over 128,000 cubic yards of debris after the storms — roughly 2 million standard kitchen trash bags worth of waste. That’s about 300 bags per each of the island’s 6,500 residents.
Treasure Island is one of 24 municipalities that make up Pinellas County, and each would work with a variety of private haulers to clean up the millions of cubic yards of waste left after the two hurricanes.
Even for one of Florida’s smaller communities, the process to remove two hurricanes’ worth of debris required two professional hauling companies working around-the-clock for nearly 50 days to haul 7,000 truck loads of trash. Compared to the 36 million cubic yards of waste processed across the state of Florida, Treasure Island is a microcosm of the various local governments and private contractors involved in cleaning the state.
The Washington Post wanted to better understand this complicated process and track individual items of debris. To do that, reporters sought permission from businesses and residents who had thrown out their belongings before sticking Apple Air Tags on 10 items. Starting in October, The Post monitored those items as they moved across southwest Florida.
Three of the tagged items best show the scope and scale of the monumental effort to remove hurricane waste and debris from this community.
An Office Chair
The first item tracked was an Avis Acadia Office Chair owned by Paradise Spa, a massage therapy and skin-care business.
Corey Mendel, owner of the spa, had to throw everything out after the storms.
“All the sewers on Treasure Island backed up. And so that created what they call Cat. 3 water,” Mendel said. “Anything that that water touches, we’re told, that has to be discarded because it’ll be, you know, toxic after that point..”
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