Thanks to Everyone Who Helped Out During the 14th Annual James River Regional Cleanup

By Michelle Kokolis, JRA Watershed Restoration Project Manager

The 14^th Annual James River Regional Cleanup was held on Saturday, September 14, 20013. This event included nearly 1,000 volunteers working at 15 sites throughout the watershed, stretching from Lynchburg to Newport News.  Each registration site is run by a dedicated member of the James River Advisory Council (JRAC), including representatives from localities and non-profit organizations.  Through generous donations from sponsors, the Council is able to provide supplies such as trash grabbers, gloves and bags for each site as well as food and drinks for some of the sites that don’t have independent sponsorship. 

As members of the Council, JRA coordinates all of the sites in the City of Richmond.  We also sponsor and run the Reedy Creek site. From Reedy Creek (the second largest of the 15 cleanup locations) volunteers are sent throughout the entire James River Park system.  As a way of saying thanks, we provide lunch for all the volunteers at the end of the cleanup. 

As we were staring at the mound of supplies for this year’s event and trying to decide how many cars it was going to take to move everything to Reedy Creek, we were struck with a thought…this sure is a lot of stuff for a trash cleanup!

If you’ve ever volunteered for any type of event you’ve probably noticed things like the t-shirt you were given or what you had for lunch, but unless you have experience running events, you probably haven’t given much thought to the amount of organization and supplies it takes. 

Let me give you a glimpse into the mountain of supplies that were hauled from the JRA office to Reedy Creek for the cleanup…

There are 11 people, a combination of JRA staff and volunteers, who run registration, serve lunch and sort the trash and recycling.  We are assisted by 5 members of the James River Park staff that spend the day collecting trash from the satellite sites and assisting with recycling.  These dedicated folks also help unload and set up all of the supplies including: 2 tents, 4 tables, 200 trash grabbers, 200 pairs of gloves, hundreds of trash bags, 10 nets and 15 burlap sacks for boaters picking up trash in the river. We also have 4 grills and use at least 2 bags of charcoal.  Then comes the food. 

We have 6 coolers that are packed with 96 hamburgers, 92 hotdogs, 60 veggie burgers and 120 slices of cheese.  The weather was cooler this year so we had fewer beverages than usual, but we still served 48 bottles of Powerade, 100 cans of soda and 20 gallons of water.  All of the food and drink was packed in 20 bags (that’s 210 pounds) of ice!  We also served 20 pounds of grapes, 15 pounds of watermelon, 156 bags of chips, 180 cookies, 192 buns, a 1-gallon jar of pickles and 5 bottles of condiments.  You may be wondering how many cars it took to move all of these supplies.  The answer is 4 SUVs.  All packed to the very top!

Now imagine this happening at 15 sites throughout the watershed on the same day at the same time.  Granted, not all sites are as large as Reedy Creek, but they are all moving mountains of supplies to achieve one common goal – a cleaner James River.

The end result for the 2014 James River Cleanup was nearly 1,000 volunteers collecting over 490 bags of trash and 220 bags of recycling.  Of this, 150 of those volunteers were at Reedy Creek, where we collected 100 bags of recycling and 56 bags of trash.

Whether you were picking up trash or helping run a site, we want to say thank you for all that you do to help make this event a huge success, and we hope to see you again next year!