The Connecticut River Watershed Council is gearing up for its 20th annual Source to Sea Cleanup on Sept. 23 and 24 and volunteers are still welcome to lend a hand in what is the largest river cleanup in New England.
Each fall, thousands of volunteers of all ages and abilities throughout Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut set out on foot and in boats along the Connecticut River and its tributaries, hauling out trash throughout the river’s 410-mile-long expanse.
To date, the annual river cleanup has removed an estimated 950 tons of trash from the Connecticut River system.
This year, some 2,000 participants already have volunteered to spend a few hours picking up trash at designated local cleanup sites.
“So far, participation this year is pretty much on par with previous years and we have a total of about 100 to 120 groups,” said Andrew Fisk, CRWC executive director of the watershed council. “We have also been seeing a lot of employee groups, with some on the clock and some are on a volunteer basis.”
Along with a variety of business, civic, religious and environmental organizations, youth and outdoor groups, and families have signed up to help.
The lead sponsors for this year’s cleanup are NRG Energy’s Middletown Generating Station, Pratt & Whitney, TransCanada, and Whistler.
In 2015, more than 2,300 volunteers in 141 cleanup groups pulled over 50 tons of trash from a total of 169 miles of riverbanks and waterways. Items collected included everything from fishing equipment, food waste, large numbers of beverage cans, plastic bottles and plastic bags, to scrap metal, construction materials, propane tanks, carpets, furniture, toilets, sinks, tires, televisions and refrigerators.
At one site in Northampton, the Massachusetts Environmental Police and Department of Public Works joined the Yankee Rowing Club and University of Massachusetts women’s and men’s rowing teams to dismantle and remove an illegal, abandoned dock.
At the Silvio O. Conte National Fish & Wildlife Refuge, volunteers filled a 30-yard container with trash, while in Greenfield over 1,000 tires were pulled from the Greenfield River.
Fisk said that many sites have remained clean over the years, while others are continually polluted by illegal dumping and cleaned up year after year.
This year, two of the larger cleanup sites will include an abandoned oil offloading platform in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and removal of a submerged 3,000-gallon tank near Wilgus State Park in Vermont.
“The old offloading platform is from back when barge traffic on the river was bringing in oil into Hartford until about 40 to 50 years ago,” Fisk said.
Fisk noted that while a lot of larger items have been removed from the river, it is the smaller refuse that is now proving to be a major problem, especially plastics and Styrofoam.
These items create serious environmental problems in rivers and when carried out to the oceans, they have a global impact on the health of marine ecosystems, wildlife and human health.
Things like single-use plastic bags, micro-beads, and Styrofoam pieces are too small, or break down too quickly, to be easily cleaned up. Wildlife can mistake these items for food, which when eaten, can cause illness or death. This trash can also make its way to the ocean, creating huge floating garbage patches.
In 2015, the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup program removed 18 million pounds of trash from the world’s coastal regions.
According to the conservancy, the top five most commonly collected items are cigarette butts, plastic beverage bottles, food wrappers, plastic bottle caps and plastic straws.
“Our goal is to keep trash and tires from getting in our rivers in the first place and to eventually put ourselves out of the cleanup business,” Fisk said.
The council collects data from cleanup groups, which is used to support year-round advocacy efforts and inform policies and legislation designed to keep waste out of the rivers.
The council also supports banning Styrofoam products and reducing the use of plastic bottles and plastic bags and also advocates for creating “extended producer responsibility” (EPR) systems that hold producers responsible for free and easy disposal by consumers of items such as tires, paint cans and appliances.
“We have to find solutions to get rid of the incentive to illegally dispose of these things, and create an incentive for product stewardship,” Fisk said.
There are three ways for volunteers to get involved in the cleanup. They may report a trash site in need of cleaning, join a cleanup group or organize and register your own local clean-up group.
For more information or to register for the event, visit www.ctriver.org/cleanup, or contact Alicea Charamut, the council’s cleanup coordinator at cleanup@ctriver.org or 860-704-0057.