It was a sight as common at Oakland’s Lake Merritt as the ducks paddling on the water or the seagulls fighting over scraps: a bright green motorized Lime scooter was submerged just feet off the murky shore.

“Aw man, the Lime person just came by this morning,” James Robinson, executive director of the Lake Merritt Institute, said when he found out about the latest scooter deposit.

It was just one of nearly 100 Lime and Bird scooters that have been dumped in the lake since late September, Robinson said. In October alone, he said, his volunteers counted 60.

This year may go down in the history books as the year of the scooter: the year all different brands and colors began appearing along sidewalks around the world, seemingly out of nowhere.

To those who hate them, they’re like an invasion from a dystopian robot future. To their fans, they’re the future of urban transport: green, high tech and fun.

What is undeniable is that the rollout could hardly be described as smooth, with vigilantes, decrying what they describe as typical tech industry hubris of companies profiting off of public spaces, expressing their displeasure through vandalism.

Some have defaced the vehicles with profane stickers and feces. Others have tossed them into trash cans and trees.

A Bird scooter rider travels with his dog in Santa Monica, California. Photograph: Dan Tuffs/The Guardian

And then, of course, there’s the dumping in waterways. A website tracking scooters tossed in the Willamette river counted 17 in August alone. San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental watchdog group, has recorded at least two scooters that have ended up in the San Francisco Bay since May. The organization has since taken up the cause against the dumping in Lake Merritt, near its offices.

“We’ve just been so frustrated,” said the Baykeeper executive director, Sejal Choksi-Chugh. “They’re just not taking this seriously.”

Meanwhile, few scooter companies will say for sure how many scooters have been vandalized, stolen, or damaged in the past year – or even how many scooters they’ve launched worldwide. Scoot Networks told the Wall Street Journal that more than 200 of the 650 scooters in San Francisco had been stolen or irreparably destroyed within two weeks of their launch, but Lime did not respond to questions on this particular topic. A Skip spokesperson says the company does not disclose numbers when it comes to theft but that Skip has seen an overall decrease.

Bird issued a statement: “Vandalism of all types of property is a problem that should not be tolerated by communities or local law enforcement.”

“We do not support the vandalism or destruction of any property and are disappointed when it takes place,” a Bird spokesperson said. “Nor do we support the encouragement, celebration or normalization of this behavior. Bird encourages people in communities to report incidents of vandalism to Birds, and irresponsible behavior on Birds, to local authorities and to the company. We investigate all reports directed to Bird and take appropriate measures, including removing people from the Bird platform.”

But through social media, the documentation of the destruction has been vast. A number of accounts exist on Instagram dedicated to posting videos and photos of all sorts of scooter vandalism.

Bird Graveyard, an account run by three friends in west Los Angeles, has more than 66,000 followers and receives anywhere from 50 to 100 submissions of scooter vandalism a day via direct message, from all around the world.

The first post, on 23 June, shows a pile of Bird scooters, one visibly broken. From there, the posts steadily escalate with videos of people throwing scooters off of buildings, scooters on fire, scooters that had been run over by a car, and dogs defecating on scooters.

The three men who run the account have never disclosed their names because of the nature of the material, but one who spoke to the Guardian said they were shining a light on a problem.

“At the beginning, it was just a joke, to bring attention to it,” he said. “But we obviously feel a very certain way about it.”

He said while he could appreciate the premise behind the scooters – an eco-friendly urban transportation alternative – he was put off by how the companies went about introducing the idea. In a way, the dockless nature of these scooters that these companies celebrate – the freedom to pick up and leave them wherever – can give the impression that the companies don’t care, whether it be about their product or the cities where it appears.

“They just started popping up one day and nobody really asked for it,” the person behind Bird Graveyard said. “We weren’t really told it was going to happen. And this has happened everywhere.”

A scooter meets the bottom of Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Photograph: Vivian Ho/The Guardian

The account was suspended once, he said, and it has had posts taken down – one video from Nashville of a car running a red light to run over a scooter was removed because Instagram told Bird Graveyard that it promoted violence. But the team say they are not worried about legal repercussions because they are not committing the vandalism: “We identify with the anger and how it’s being expressed, but we’re in our 30s almost,” he said. “If I was 18, hell yeah. I’d be out there scratching scooters because I wouldn’t know any better.”

Their hope, they say, is that the vandalism will push a conversation and force the companies to consider their behavior when it comes to rolling out these scooters in different cities.

Some companies have already done just that, especially following enforcement in some of the flagship cities. San Francisco, one of the first battlegrounds for the scooter war of 2018, impounded 503 scooters in the first incursion in the spring – 208 from Lime, 193 from Bird, and 102 from Spin, said Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for the city’s department of public works.

The city returned the scooters to their respective companies after they paid their fees, Gordon said – Lime paid $15,784.50, Bird $15,547.17, and Spin $14,189.06.

San Francisco has since launched a pilot scooter program, granting permits to Scoot and Skip in October. In the first six months, each company will be allowed a maximum of 625 scooters, with the potential to increase in the following six months to a cap of 2,500.

“Skip’s strategy is to work closely with cities to be the best regulatory brand and leverage our co-founders’ experience to build the best scooters in the market,” said the company’s chief marketing officer, Julie Supan. “We only enter cities with local support.”

While companies will work with local law enforcement when it comes to property damage and vandalism of their scooters, few work with community groups in seeking measures to curb environmental damage.

According to Robinson, the executive director of the Lake Merritt Institute, only Lime is actively working with his organization, sending a representative to weekly cleanups to better understand the lake and how to retrieve the scooters. Robinson and his volunteers have been instructed by both Lime and Bird not to touch the scooters, which is frustrating, because company representatives don’t always end up locating the scooters in a timely manner.

Lime has agreed to make the area around the lake a no-parking zone for its scooters, but at least two were still parked along the perimeter one recent day – and dozens more were located feet away.

Robinson said he believed the solution was for the scooters to get some sort of locking and docking mechanism, like the Ford rental bicycles in the region. When the bicycle program first launched, he said, a few ended up in the lake, but the dumping stopped once permanent docking stations were put in place.

“We have to, at some point, put the environment above profits,” Robinson said. “The community cares about the lake and it’s disheartening for them to come out week after week and see these products out in the lake and not harbor some kind of bad feelings toward these companies.”