The problem stopped feeling occasional.
I got tired of trash showing up in my yard day after day. Some of it came from neighbors. Some of it came from people throwing garbage out of cars as they drove by. Some of it came from garbage trucks and waste handling that were sloppy enough to leave trash scattered across my street and into town instead of fully contained.
At the same time, I kept seeing local cleanup efforts on the news and online. People cared. People were trying. But the same question kept hanging there: where is the simple public place that ties all of this together?
There was no obvious place to drop a report, see whether the same spot had already been flagged, or make repeated trouble visible enough that it stopped being easy to forget.