For the outreach project, I participated in the River’s Alive river cleanup on the morning of October 5th. For this, I went to the North Oconee Greenway right off of College Avenue, north of campus. When I got there, I was given gloves, a vest, and a trash bag and was told to pick up trash for about a quarter of a mile stretch along the river. What I noticed was that where there was trash, there was a lot of trash. But a lot of the areas along the river were fairly clean.

It genuinely frustrated me about some of the trash that people left. A lot of it was broken glass chards (that were extremely thick), entire milk jugs, tires, and more things that are incredibly noticeable. How can the city of Athens take any pride in its river greenway if there is blatantly obvious trash left. I expected to see more cans, wrappers, and bottles along the river, but I was unpleasantly surprised at the large scale trash that there was. Still, it felt good to collect.

Anytime I participate in activities of clean-up, I feel genuinely good about the experience. Everything I pick up makes a difference, because I might be the only person who notices something and decides to do something. I learned that to get the most out of the experience though, it is important to leave nothing behind because as I said, it might never get picked up. For example, leaving behind a non bio-degradable broken glass bottle could end up hurting someone who doesn’t expect to step on it when they are walking along the river shoeless.

To say that I am going to go out of my way to pick up trash at the river again because of this experience would be a lie. However, I am going to be more conscious about leaving waste along the roadside, which is where I ended up seeing a lot of the smaller scale trash that I expected down by the river.