Environment
Volunteers Pull Eleven Tons of Debris From the Riverside Channel
A record 1,340 registrants worked nine access points on Saturday in the annual cleanup, which organizers say is now recovering less material each year — a sign they take as good news.
Volunteers removed just over eleven tons of debris from the Riverside Channel and its banks on Saturday, in the eighteenth year of an annual cleanup that has become the county's largest single-day volunteer event.
Organizers registered 1,340 participants across nine access points, up from 1,102 last year. Crews worked from 7 a.m. to about 1 p.m., with the largest turnout at the Ferris Road and Halloran Street entries.
By weight, the recovered material was mostly construction debris, tires and yard waste. Volunteers also pulled two shopping carts, a filing cabinet and roughly 400 pounds of plastic packaging.
The total is down from fourteen tons last year and from a peak of thirty-one tons in 2014 — a decline organizers describe as the point of the exercise.
"The goal was always to put ourselves out of business," said Marcus Rhee, who has coordinated the cleanup since 2011. "Eleven tons is still eleven tons. But we used to fill the dumpsters by ten in the morning and have to call for more."
Rhee credited the improvement mostly to the county's expanded bulky-waste pickup program, introduced in 2016, which he said removed much of the incentive to dump large items along the access roads.
The county's water quality division will publish its annual channel assessment in October. Last year's report found bacterial counts within state limits at seven of nine monitoring points.
Note: The Riverside Ledger is a fictional newspaper built as a demonstration of a static news site. This article is invented — the people, organizations, quotations and events described here do not exist and did not happen.