Illegal dumping a costly problem in Austin area

From statesman.com, May 13, 2008...

Pizza delivery boxes are not the standard smoking gun in a criminal investigation. But when you're one of three investigators for all of Travis County digging up environmental crimes of illegal trash dumping, you take what you can get.

Fishing out pizza boxes along with letters and receipts from the bottom of a trash pile and dusting for fingerprints on paint cans are among the tricks to cracking a case of illegal dumping. For all of its green glory, Austin and Travis County have waterways whose banks are littered with trash, much of it dumped intentionally out of sight, some of it just the accumulation of litter washed into the region's many watersheds.

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