Volunteers spend MLK Day picking up litter

While some enjoyed having Monday off for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, a group of nine volunteers were hard at work removing litter.

Those who turned out for the cleanup day, organized by Keep Athens-Limestone Beautiful and with help from the nonprofit Tennessee Riverkeeper, pulled more than 1,900 pounds of aquatic litter from the Swan Creek Wildlife Management Area and the Tennessee River. Tennessee Riverkeeper hosted a cleanup day last month that netted more than 1,600 pounds of litter.

David Whiteside, founder of Tennessee Riverkeeper, said the group prevented more than 19,000 pounds of litter from entering the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers in 2019.

“These events show that a few people can make a difference, and cleanups provide some hope for hundreds of thousands of citizens who are concerned about our blessed river and its tributaries,” he said. “Clean water is a nonpartisan issue; we are all in this together.”

Most of the litter was made from some form of plastic, with the most common being Styrofoam, bottles, shopping bags and straws. Six tires were also removed, including a few large truck tires.

“Tires are bad for water quality because they can contain benzene, arsenic, mercury, styrene-butadiene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, as well as several other chemicals, heavy metals and carcinogens,” Whiteside said.

The roads around the Swan Creek WMA have a lot of litter, he said, adding the litter will eventually make it to creeks and rivers after rain events.

“Unfortunately, this creates a situation where waterways receive a plethora of plastics,” Whiteside said. “We now know that this garbage negatively impacts water quality and is much more than just a visible eyesore.”

Last year, Tennessee Riverkeeper launched a campaign to remove plastic and other litter from waterways in an effort to educate the public about the pollution threat. Whiteside cited a statistic that the Tennessee River is polluted by as many as 16,000 to 18,000 microplastic particles per cubic meter.

“This pollution occurs when larger plastics breakdown over time,” he said. “Experts think that they can last for hundreds of years, and toxicity can ‘biomagnify’ as microplastics build up in the food chain.”

He said there's no easy solution to the issue, so preventing the plastics from entering waterways by removing litter from shorelines is “an obvious solution.” He said it's also important to inform residents that littering not only makes the community “look trashy,” it also impairs fishing and water quality.

One of those helping with the cleanup effort was Lynne Hart, executive coordinator of Keep Athens-Limestone Beautiful. She said since MLK Day is supposed to be a day of service, picking up litter seemed like a worthwhile project.

“A lot of people are off work that day and are looking for service projects,” she said, adding members of the Limestone County Master Gardeners also volunteered. “We just didn't know it was going to be 25 degrees. It was not the ideal trash collection weather.”

Despite their haul, Hart said it barely scratched the surface. She estimated if volunteers picked up four bags of litter for every one-tenth of a mile on Harris Station Road, it would equal about 3 tons of litter along the 4.6-mile road.

“There are probably 15 to 20 tons of trash that still needs to be picked up,” she said. “We just barely dented it and got 1,900 pounds.”