Trash

One of the best perks of this internship is the amount of time that we interns get to spend on the water. Sometimes I will  even go out on one of my days off, or for a post-work kayak. On every trip to the river I have found trash floating in the water or stuck in the vegetation. Yesterday, while doing a field test for a soon-to-be-released CRWA app, I found a plastic soda bottle, a beer bottle cap, a beer can, and a tennis ball floating in the water near the Woerd Avenue boat dock. Two feet away was a school of fish and a large toad. On my first trip to the river, Intern Evan and I saw a submerged shopping cart near the Moody Street bridge in Waltham.While trash should be expected in an urban river such as the Charles, I often wonder how much trash is in the river and how does it get there? More importantly, who takes it out?

A Trash Biography, a study (found here) performed by the Friends of the Los Angeles River, proposed that trash reaches the rivers because it is blow into the river, is washed into the river via rainstorm runoff, or is directly deposited (“dumped”)  into the river. Their study also found that plastic film, or single use plastics such as drink pouches, chip bags, and granola bar wrappers were the most abundant type of trash found in the river.

To remove trash from the river and the river banks, CRWA hosts the annual Charles River Clean Up. This year, according to the Medfield Patch, 15-20 tons of trash was collected (click here to read the entire article). If you would like to get involved with next year’s Charles River Clean Up, click  here here for more information.

During the spring and summer months, the Charles River Clean Up Boat takes volunteers to pick trash out of the lower Charles, from Watertown bridge to Boston Harbor. Tom McNichol, the founder of the non-profit, and his volunteers have found all sorts of garbage in the river, from a portable toilet to a dead body to bags full of packing peanuts. For more information on the Charles River Clean Up Boat, click here.

Of course, the easiest way to fix this problem is to prevent trash from entering the Charles. Everyone can help by never littering or dumping trash into the river. In addition, when it is safe to do so, anyone can help reduce the amount of trash in the river by picking up litter whenever you see it. Whether you are walking along the bank and spot a plastic bottle resting on the bank or if you are paddling in a canoe and see a plastic bottle floating by, pick the garbage up and put it in a trash can or a recycling bin. 

Have a litter free weekend!

Cait

P.S. While researching information for this blog, I came across this(http://www.trashpaddler.com/)  blog, Trash Paddler, written by a man who kayaks the Sudbury, Assabet and Concord Rivers, picking up trash and recording what he finds on his blog. It is very interesting, has great photos of trash and the river ecosystem, and is definitely worth a read.