On Saturday September 17th we participated in the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC). Organizations around the globe have been participating in the ICC for over 35 years. Since its inception, there have been over 17 million volunteers who have picked up 348 million pounds of trash¹.Â
The Bronx River Alliance helped to clean up the shoreline of the Bronx River at Soundview Park. This area is particularly important because it is the mouth of the Bronx River, which is where the river meets the East River and eventually flows into the Long Island Sound.Â
There were over 60 volunteers at our cleanup. We had groups form Con Edison, Build On, Friends of Soundview Park and our Bronx River EELS interns, as well as individual volunteers from the surrounding communities participate in the cleanup. In total we collected 47 bags of trash and over 5,000 items were removed from the Soundview shoreline. The most common pieces of trash we found were plastic packaging and styrofoam.Â
We encouraged our volunteers to try and collect the most trash in their smaller groups and try to find the weirdest piece of trash. The most trash collected was by a group of 3 student volunteers from Build On who collected 529 pieces of trash. The weirdest piece of trash found was a piece from a boat which was found by another group of student volunteers from Build On.Â
A big thank you to Con Edison for providing financial support to the Alliance’s volunteer programs, and to Patagonia, REI and Clif Bar for providing donations that helped support our event. We also want to thank local journalist, Mansi Vithlani for coming to the event and reporting on it. You can check out her article on The Bronx Ink.Â
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¹Data from Ocean Conservancy
