Hi everyone! This is my first official blog post so I have a good amount of time to recap but I mostly want to focus on what has occurred in the last two-ish weeks. The biggest thing so far has definitely been the annual Sweep the Hooch event that Mina and I attended on Saturday, March 23rd. There were over 64 sites cleaned, Mina and I went to the Murphey Candler Park one from 9am to 12pm and we got very lucky because we had beautiful weather (the photo is from one of the trails we cleaned up). 

        We mostly stayed on land due to not having proper waders but we still worked our tails off collecting all of the tiny trash that would have washed into the water eventually if not picked up. In total, on Saturday there were 46 volunteers including ourselves at our location and we managed to collect 1530 lbs of trash, 380 lbs of recycling and 5 tires (a pretty impressive amount if I do say so myself). The biggest takeaways I had from this was how easy it was to do a little good for this earth by spending some easy hours collecting trash and that Double Bubble desperately needs to make their packing biodegradable because I picked up so many of those little wrappers to the point I almost went insane. 

         Before this Saturday, I had been going to Chattahoochee Riverkeeper on Fridays to help with trash collection from the trash traps and conducting ETAPs (essentially a forensic litter audit using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Escaped Trash Assessment Protocol—in simple terms it is just categorizing what was collected into subcategories like take-out boxes, shopping bags, water bottles, etc. and marking brands that show up repeatedly). In this process they also collect water samples to do tests for high levels of anything dangerous in the water. A major situation unfolded while I was there on the 15th when CRK detected dangerously high levels of E. coli in the Chattahoochee River downstream from the R.M. Clayton Water Reclamation Center. There was a big problem with how the AJC was reporting it and spreading misinformation about how long those high levels had been detected and CRK had to make public statements suggesting staying out of the water and requesting that a more factual timeline be displayed to the public. Jordan Yu (CRK Watershed Protection Specialist), Mina and I actually went to the Water Reclamation Center to get a sample from where the water was going into the river (big big big shoutout to Mina for sacrificing herself by getting in full gear to get close to the splashing sewer water). When we got back news stations were there to talk to CRK and Mina and I went inside to thoroughly cleanse ourselves from the nasty water. 

         So far, I have really enjoyed having this opportunity to work with Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and could definitely see myself participating in their local events after this class ends based on the good time I had at the Sweep the Hooch event.