Howdy everyone! Since my last time posting, not a whole heck of a lot has changed from what I was doing before but I’ll give a few smaller updates. For starters, we have continued to do the weekly trash trap cleanouts and do the standard ETAPs for what we collect (ETAPs are forensic litter audits 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).

One location we did, we ended up collecting nearly 30 full manicure/pedicure kits as well as roughly 10 half-to-full cans of yellow spray paint (an odd collection of items if I do say so myself). Our assumption for the spray cans was that someone was fixing certain parking and road lines up by the nearby road and purposefully disposed of the rest of the cans for reasons unknown. For the manicure/pedicure kits, we guess since they were prepackaged and seemed undamaged that a truck delivering the product had a shipment fall off and land somewhere in the river. Either way, both acts come from a place ignorance and since both ended up in the river, they both should be held accountable for their faulty choices. 

Another thing that I noticed is that one of the reasons it takes extra time to clean out each trash trap is the sheer amount of sticks, leaves, and general parts of nature that end up making their way in amongst all of the collectable trash and recycling. I talked about this with Jordan and it seems there is no real effective way to sort out the items that CRK seeks to collect out of the river and distribute the natural items back into the stream, but I would love to see some type of advancement in that area sometime in the future because it definitely adds another level of difficulty for those who have a kind enough soul to clean those traps for a living. 

I am coming up on my last time volunteering with CRK in person but I can definitely see myself helping them out with larger river clean ups in future and I can truly say I have appreciated the opportunities I have had to work alongside them this semester.