There was a time in this country when we treated our rivers like sewers. Items flushed down the toilet made their way straight into the nearest rivers, rendering many of them unfit for swimming, fishing or other recreational pursuits.

Thankfully, that’s largely no longer the case, though the cleanup didn’t come cheap.

We’ve spent billions – maybe even trillions – of taxpayer dollars to change that by installing sewage treatment plants and paying attention to the runoff from stormwater and agricultural fertilizers that drain into our rivers.

Now we use them as landfills for the criminally inclined.

At least that’s one of the conclusions to be drawn from the excavation project taking place on a stretch of the Nashua River these days.

While the river level is down due to work on the downtown dam, officials have decided to do a little fall cleaning, so workers from Reliable Construction in Salem began hauling debris out of the river on Monday, using the riverbank behind the Nashua Mall’s Home Depot store as one of the project’s staging areas.

Their take thus far includes all manner of scrap metal, a trailer load of rusted-out bicycles, a gun, a purse, a wallet, several heavy boilers, a parking meter, a cash register and half a dozen tires.

“We probably pulled two or three tons (of junk),” Reliable’s Rocky Morrison said.

We’re going to go out on a limb here and guess that the cash register, wallet, purse and gun may have been stolen at some point. The parking meter, too, though we suspect that the return on investment it yielded was pretty minimal compared to the labor it must have taken to get it out of the ground.

And, it seems, the river has also served as the place where shopping carts go to die. Workers hauled more than 200 such carts out of the river, enough to stock a medium-sized grocery store. The Market Basket in Hudson, for instance, had 326 shopping carts in stock last week, according to the store’s manager.

The presence of the boilers in the river would seem to indicate that someone didn’t want to pay the fee they would have incurred to deposit them at the landfill, though they conceivably could have been sold for scrap, which is what the construction company will do with much of the metal it finds.

Workers are not done cleaning the mile-long stretch they’ve targeted.

“This is just one little phase,” Morrison said.

The haul is a sad commentary on our throw-away society and, perhaps, on the fact that not everybody treasures the river as a natural resource the way they should.

Granted, our rivers are in much better shape than those in some third-world countries that still use them for sewers.

But we can’t help but think that they’re still a bit underappreciated.

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