Historic Garbage Gobbler gets face lift in expanded Langford park

A local piece of history has been given a new coat of paint and a more prominent location in the newly expanded Veterans Memorial Park in Langford.

The Garbage Gobbler is a piece of B.C. history, with roots in Langford dating back to the 1950s.

Len Shaw, the creator of the Garbage Gobbler, was a BC Parks employee working out of the Langford office, which now houses the West Shore Chamber of Commerce, right beside Veterans Memorial Park.

Prior to the park’s expansion this week, the Garbage Gobbler sat slightly tucked away next to the chamber of commerce building.

The Garbage Gobbler in 2025, before it was refurbished next to the West Shore Chamber of Commerce building. (CHEK News photo)

Now, it has been moved to a more central location, next to the new bandshell.

“Quite like it there,” Marilyn Fuller said to CHEK News. “It’s nice and shiny.”

Fuller is the daughter of Shaw, the Garbage Gobbler creator, and says she remembers her dad coming up with the idea for them.

Marilyn Fuller with the refurbished Garbage Gobbler in Veterans Memorial Park in Langford. (CHEK News photo)

“He didn’t like to see the garbage when we were travelling. We would stop if there was any around. He would always pick it up,” she said.

“Dad had a really good imagination, and he liked animals, and he said, ‘Well, we’ve got to come up with something.’ So I remember him sketching different things, and he came up with the Garbage Gobbler, which is kind of half owl, half frog, half anything else you could imagine. And so he took it to his crew, and they said, ‘Yeah, we can do something like that.’ So that’s when it started.”

Anna Irwin, collection manager archives at BC Archives, says the idea first came up in 1958 and then they were placed along B.C. roadways in the coming decades.

After the Second World War, it became more accessible for people to buy cars, but they weren’t yet used to planning on what to do with their garbage.

“So people would open the window, they would throw it out the window, and then we ended up with a lot of litter on the side of the highways, and over time that accumulated,” Irwin said.

“There wasn’t really a plan for how do we collect this, how do we stop this?”

Irwin says the Garbage Gobblers attracted a lot of attention, and there were signs next to them that said “Feed Me.”

“Then people would stop and go ‘What’s this?’ And hopefully put their garbage inside,” Irwin said.

Nowadays it’s more widely accepted to not litter, but at the time the idea of properly disposing of your trash was just beginning to be talked about.

“At the time a lot of our tourism was, and it still is today, based on the concept of Beautiful British Columbia, and nature was a huge draw, and continues to be a huge draw for people visiting the province,” Irwin said.

“Garbage really undercut that, and so there were calls at the time to not litter. No one ever ties it directly to that, but keeping roadways clean really does tie into that keeping British Columbia clean.”

The Garbage Gobblers eventually fell out of use as the open backs on them became a “bear buffet” and now garbages are built to be bear proof.

Some of them still sit around the province as a reminder of the original push to prevent littering, including the one in Veterans Memorial Park.

However, Fuller says the Langford one was almost disposed of when the park was first being built in the early 2000s.

“When they first started developing this park, they had a big stack of cement and rubble, and this little guy was on the top of it,” she recalled.

“So I phoned City Hall and asked what was happening. They said he was going to go to the rubbish pile, and I said, ‘Well, no,’ then they dropped it off at our house when we lived on Jenkins, and we refurbished it, repainted it, fixed it up, and gave it back, and then they put it over in the original Veterans Park, and now they put it over here. I’m glad to see he’s still here.”

Watch Now You Know BC’s episode about the Garbage Gobbler below:

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