When the price of scrap metal spikes, so apparently do spikes of scrap metal.
This bit of wisdom comes from an employee at Les Schwab’s Hazel Dell store, who fixed a Columbian editor’s flat tire earlier this month.
The culprit was a two-inch piece of scrap metal stuck in the tire tread.
The tire tech said that it seems like they’re removing more of this kind of debris from wounded tires lately, and thinks it is due to the price of scrap metal.
It makes sense that more loads of discarded iron and steel headed to metal recyclers would mean more sharp stuff falling off a truck and onto the road.
A check at http://www.metalprices.com bears out his suspicion; scrap prices have soared in the past year. Bloomberg, the business news service, reports in a recent dispatch from London that rising scrap metal prices are perhaps due to “more price stickiness out there than people think. There are maybe more inflationary pressures in the pipeline than the Monetary Policy Committee thought.”
All of which illustrates another way the world economy ties to our lives — increasing price inflation leads to decreasing tire inflation.
Dog waste worries
Oregon transportation officials started firing propane-fueled cannons on the Interstate Bridge a while ago to keep birds from pooping on the span.
Bird droppings can damage the steel.
But that’s not the only public campaign against animal waste. The county’s clean water program points out that our dogs leave more behind than paw prints. They generate 12 million pounds of dog waste a year,
Elena Cronin, with the county’s clean water outreach program, said their calculations used information from the U.S. Census and the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Clark County residents own more than 100,000 dogs, Cronin said while staffing an information booth at a recent community event. Each dog averages about 2.3 pounds of poochy poo a week, according to canine authorities at the vet association.
It adds up to 6,000 tons a year, which can wind up in our groundwater or get washed into local streams, she said.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
