Chattahoochee Riverkeeper
Trash Talk That's Mighty Sick
Song lyrics can be eerily precise in capturing your feelings. It happened to me yesterday when two lines from a 1972 hit by Grand Funk Railroad got stuck in my head:
“I’m your captain, I’m your captain
Though I’m feeling mighty sick.”
I heard the lines while out on a morning walk. The day had dawned as an encouraging one, brisk air with sun prevailing over clouds. Listening to “I’m Your Captain,” I was thinking about how to write about the river cleanup I had just completed with a Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK) volunteer group. Fred, my husband, had joined me for the project, and while I felt good about the work and learned much along the way, it also left me feeling discouraged in a few ways. What exactly was it about the cleanup that left me identifying with the words “mighty sick”?
River cleanups are routine volunteer events that CRK employees organize several times a year around Atlanta. I discovered this one because I’d been reading the CRK newsletter since helping at the Westside River Rendezvous to sample water quality. (That project was the impetus for The Everyday Scientist.) As soon as I read about the Tanyard Creek cleanup, I signed us up, borrowed two sets of rubber boots and posted the date on our new 2023 (Backyard Birds!) wall calendar. I know the area well because I often take long walks along these miles of the BeltLine.
On Saturday, we headed down to the site where we joined the other volunteers and heard these basic guidelines from our CRK organizer:
Use the trash grabbers and always wear the cut-resistant gloves.
Stay with your group.
Remove trash from creek and from along the banks.
Bag it up, carry it out.
Our group walked a half mile along the BeltLine, then bushwhacked our way down into the little valley created by Tanyard Creek. “There’s plenty of work here,” our group leader said, waving her trash grabber out like it was a magic wand. Which would have been nice to have in this mess.
White shreds of debris draped down over the water, got stuck in brush along the banks, and was deeply mired down in the creek, often jammed up into dirty white plastic balls wedged in boulders and river rocks. Here, Tanyard Creek was wadeable and could be crossed in about 10 giant steps. Just a baby of a creek, it was today, but I could see evidence of flooding and high-water indicators along the banks where leaves and limbs were coated with old mud in a dusky shade of gray. Using my trash grabbers, I started plucking, picking and filling my trash bag. Few people spoke at first, but after a short while the tedium got to us, and we started naming names.
“Look, there’s Mr. Potato Head’s plastic lips.”
“Here’s a padded black bra.”
“Blue medical glove. Corona Lite. Red Bull. A piece of rebar. Frito bag. A maroon jacket.”
The listing went on for a while, but before long trash talk didn’t entertain us anymore so we hushed. We all gradually folded back into our interior worlds as ordinary volunteer trash collectors. Sometimes Saturday walkers out for a stroll on the BeltLine would startle us, yet give us a sweet shot of dopamine, when they hollered “thanks” down into the ravine where we toiled.
Mostly, down by the riverside, there was plastic. Plastic, usually in shredded pieces and gray-white, was tattered and hanging, or wedged and half-buried everywhere I looked. Plastic was the centerpiece eyesore of the place. Waving balloons may prettily catch the eye at the realtor’s open house, but Tanyard’s fluttering bits had the opposite effect, likely repelling the gaze of visitors to the park. As I tried to remove some of the offending fragments of waste, I could stand in one place and collect trash from above, below and beside me. Later, I noticed other volunteers came behind me and found even more stuff that I’d missed or couldn’t reach. What’s with all this plastic?
Grating Problems
Before we got started at Tanyard, an environmental lawyer who lived in the local neighborhood spoke to the volunteers. I was surprised when he said most of the trash we would pick out of Tanyard that day came from two nearby interstate highways. “If highway engineers had installed the right type of grates in I-85 and I-75, you all wouldn’t have to be down here picking up all this nasty trash. Whatever stormwater washes off the roadways, it flows down and ends up in this creek. Those highways? They are really close by.”
A look at a map confirms what the man said. Just north of the city, Interstate 85 and Interstate 75 flow together forming a Y shape. Right near the Y’s intersection sits tiny Tanyard Creek Park.
Hearing about the effects of those multilane highways less than a mile from where we were made me feel extra discouraged that morning. On our drive home, I told Fred, “I would be happier knowing I was just picking up the onesies and twosies bits of trash dropped by careless people.” As I talked, I looked down at the grimy sheen of mud on my rubber boots. While I had seen that portions of Tanyard looked much cleaner after we left, I realized that the work we’d done was considerably filthier than I’d expected. “This anonymous 85 and 75 trash? It feels so institutional. A half million people driving by every day? This crap could all be back here again next week. Ugh! So, discouraging. It feels like a world hunger problem now.”
“Well, yes, but,” Fred replied. “Trash is trash whether it got stopped up there on the highway or down here in the creek. Altogether, there is too much littering and too much throwaway stuff.”
I had never given a thought to the particulars of interstate highway water drainage until that day. Back at home, I did some research just to ensure I knew the difference between stormwater and wastewater. Wastewater is the water that goes down a sink or toilet and flows into a wastewater treatment plant. Stormwater flows down hard surfaces like highways and usually goes into a gutter. There is usually a grate over the gutter to filter out trash, but there are many types of grates, some work better than others, and they all should be cleaned regularly to prevent clogs. Stormwater goes directly into our lakes, rivers (like Tanyard) and oceans.
To sum up, I, as your captain at The Everyday Scientist, had a sobering weekend down at Tanyard Creek, and just like the lyrics of the song say, I felt “mighty sick.” But, just for a little while. There was no “Grand Funk” (har-har). That’s because the CRK work day concluded with some amazing stats.
Check out the hard data:
In just 2.5 hours of work, 90 bags of trash (almost half a ton) was collected by 29 volunteers.
As for the soft data, know this: portions of that waterway looked fantastic after we were done. Before I left, I took an after picture of Tanyard Creek, and to me, the water travelled downstream better now, looking lighter and brighter in the afternoon sun.
Earlier I had told a volunteer: “You know how you don’t wanna go around being judgy all the time? Doing this will test ya. Amirite?”
She laughed and agreed. “Yeah, we should bring back the litterbug ads. If people would come out and clean up a creek like this––just one time––they’d stop it with the dang litter.”
I kept puzzling over those grates. Yesterday, I drove back down to Buckhead to walk over the I-85/I-75 connector. Looking down from the bridge over these highways (10-plus lanes across), I saw that some of the grates looked fine. But the one pictured below? It is not helping Tanyard Creek one bit.
My community science projects so far have been focused on the rivers and the birds but my plan is to keep mixing things up.
I’m traveling to D.C. to visit family for the MLK weekend and plan to visit the amphibian exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. The information I learn there, I hope, will prep me for the FrogWatch USA projects that I’ll do back here in Atlanta in the spring.
Coming soon:
I’ll explain how I will soon be working with the backyard weather observers in a fantastic organization called CoCoRaHS.
CoCoRaHS
I live in a very rural part of eastern NC that sits on the banks of the Neuse River. The Neuse Riverkeeper does a great job, but the litter along our highways is daunting. I see it every time I cycle outside our town limits.
I periodically ask myself why people air mail their garbage while traveling at 55 mph. Is it laziness? Is it the lack of convenient trash receptacles? Or, is it resentment that someone expects them to conform to a specific community standard? One person told me they are providing jobs for the cleanup crews!
But, I wonder what the woman was thinking when she tossed her padded bra. It's not the 1960's when going braless was a political statement. I guess it could have malfunctioned on her way to work and she wanted to hide that fact from a parking lot attendant. Then I realized we no longer have attendants in parking lots.
Fortunately for us, and our Riverkeeper, most of the local highway litter stays put until the cleanup crews do their job. Once a year the RK organizes a fisherman led cleanup of the Neuse riverbanks. Amazing how much litter comes downstream from Raleigh. And, how impassioned are those fishermen to keep their workplace clean.
Thanks Pam for sharing our story. I’m often asked how I can keep leading these cleanups – how it doesn’t get to me. It’s because of the volunteers – the awareness I see come over them. Most come back time and time again.
I thought you might like to see these hard stats. 2021 we removed 63 Tons and last year we removed just over 59 Tons. It's sad that littering still exists, it's heartwarming to see so many get out to help.
Hope to see you and your husband on another cleanup. We host 1-2 per month open to the public. And we plan private service projects for companies – which has become really popular.
Tammy Bates
Outings Director for Chattahoochee Riverkeeper