NORTHAMPTON — Susan Norton walked across Riverside Drive on Saturday morning with a trash bag slung over her shoulder. She held a thick roll of metallic silver paper, her sweatshirt sprinkled with burrs.
“Who would dump something like this into the river?” Norton asked, looking at the roll of paper and shaking her head.
She placed the trash next to a pickup truck and adjusted her straw hat, a “Stop the Pipeline” button fastened to one side. She rummaged through the truck in search of another trash bag, ready to head back to the riverbank to collect more garbage.
She said the choice to help clean up the river Saturday morning was an easy one.
“It’s the world I live in,” Norton said.
Norton was one of some 20 people who joined forces to clean up the Mill River from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. That was part of the Connecticut River Watershed Council’s 20th annual Source to Sea Cleanup, a four-state effort to pick up trash and debris along rivers and shorelines.
Clad in yellow T-shirts, the group in Northampton scoured a two-mile span of the river along Riverside Drive and Federal Street for debris such as plastic products, abandoned cans and even hunks of metal left behind from Northampton’s industrial age. The Mill River cleanup was sponsored by New England Environmental Inc., of Amherst. The company is a division of environmental consultant SWCA Inc., based in Phoenix.
Other Source to Sea events took place in area communities including Amherst, Hadley, Sunderland and Greenfield.
John Sinton, a member of the board of trustees for the Connecticut River Watershed Council, stood at the edge of the road, guiding volunteers to cleanup sites along the Mill River. A self-proclaimed “river rat,” Sinton said there was no place he would rather be on a Saturday morning.
“The river runs through our lives, it’s always here. It’s the first thing you want to take care of,” Sinton said.
Sinton said the cleanup event is part of a larger effort to encourage people to explore the Mill River, which is a rich part of the city’s history.
“We are working on bringing people back to the river,” Sinton said. “Northampton is so strange. The river ran right through it, and then they moved it, so people don’t know why some things are the way they are.”
Sinton maneuvered through the woods and to the bank of the river, an exploration that was part hike and part community service. Though volunteers quickly filled bags with garbage from the riverbank, Sinton said the land is much cleaner than it was before the cleanup effort began two decades ago. In the past, residents and local companies would throw large appliances like refrigerators into the river, Sinton said.
The most common items pulled from the riverbank Saturday were much smaller than the appliances of years past. There were plastic water bottles, cans and tiny bottles of alcohol, according to Jeff Dawson, an ecological designer for New England Environmental Inc.
“There have been a lot of cans of Twisted Tea and Fireball nips,” Dawson said with a chuckle. “There have been newspapers that might’ve fallen off of a truck and bags of trash that probably were left on the side of the road.”
Dawson said his company has participated in the cleanup for the past several years.
“The main goal is to clean up the river, but it’s also nice getting together with people and enjoying this place,” Dawson said. “We’ve got a really good group.”
About 10 New England Environmental Inc. employees participated, which is nearly half its 25-person staff, according to employee Stephen Powers, of Southampton.
Powers was there with his wife, Stacey Powers, and their daughter Cassidy Powers, a high school sophomore cleaning up the river to clock community service hours.
To keep the river clean beyond planned events in the fall and spring, Dawson said visitors can make a difference by cleaning up trash as they walk along the bank. Dawson recommended visitors bring a plastic bag, fill it with trash and properly dispose of it.
That advice is second nature for Norton, the resident of the city’s Bay State section who pulled the metallic paper roll from the riverbank Saturday morning.
Though Norton has participated in the annual event for more than a dozen years, she said cleaning up the Mill River is a daily habit, especially when she walks her dog along the bank. Instead of filling the plastic bag she brings along just with dog waste, she ends up stuffing those bags with trash she finds along the river.
“I do it daily,” Norton said. “My dog’s poop bag has more trash in it than poop most of the time.”