{"id":910207,"date":"2026-09-26T09:36:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T09:36:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/910207\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T09:36:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T09:36:20","slug":"historic-garbage-gobbler-gets-face-lift-in-expanded-langford-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/910207\/","title":{"rendered":"Historic Garbage Gobbler gets face lift in expanded Langford park"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Garbage Gobbler is a piece of B.C. history, with roots in Langford dating back to the 1950s.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Prior to the park\u2019s expansion this week, the Garbage Gobbler sat slightly tucked away next to the chamber of commerce building.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Garbage Gobbler in 2025, before it was refurbished next to the West Shore Chamber of Commerce building. (CHEK News photo)<\/p>\n

Now, it has been moved to a more central location, next to the new bandshell.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuite like it there,\u201d Marilyn Fuller said to CHEK News. \u201cIt\u2019s nice and shiny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fuller is the daughter of Shaw, the Garbage Gobbler creator, and says she remembers her dad coming up with the idea for them.<\/p>\n

\"\"Marilyn Fuller with the refurbished Garbage Gobbler in Veterans Memorial Park in Langford. (CHEK News photo)<\/p>\n

\u201cHe didn\u2019t like to see the garbage when we were travelling. We would stop if there was any around. He would always pick it up,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cDad had a really good imagination, and he liked animals, and he said, \u2018Well, we\u2019ve got to come up with something.\u2019 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, \u2018Yeah, we can do something like that.\u2019 So that\u2019s when it started.\u201d<\/p>\n

READ ALSO: Langford\u2019s Veterans Memorial Park nearly doubles in size after re-opening<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

After the Second World War, it became more accessible for people to buy cars, but they weren\u2019t yet used to planning on what to do with their garbage.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo 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,\u201d Irwin said. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere wasn\u2019t really a plan for how do we collect this, how do we stop this?\u201d<\/p>\n

Irwin says the Garbage Gobblers attracted a lot of attention, and there were signs next to them that said \u201cFeed Me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen people would stop and go \u2018What\u2019s this?\u2019 And hopefully put their garbage inside,\u201d Irwin said.<\/p>\n

Nowadays it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt 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,\u201d Irwin said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGarbage 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Garbage Gobblers eventually fell out of use as the open backs on them became a \u201cbear buffet\u201d and now garbages are built to be bear proof.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

However, Fuller says the Langford one was almost disposed of when the park was first being built in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I phoned City Hall and asked what was happening. They said he was going to go to the rubbish pile, and I said, \u2018Well, no,\u2019 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\u2019m glad to see he\u2019s still here.\u201d<\/p>\n

READ ALSO: Garbage Gobblers: How a Vancouver Island \u2018monster\u2019 curbed littering in the fifties<\/a><\/p>\n

Watch Now You Know BC\u2019s episode about the Garbage Gobbler below:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A local piece of history has been given a new coat of paint and a more prominent location…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":910208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66,1062],"class_list":["post-910207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}