‘It’s crazy how much trash is here’
Across multiple states, volunteers clean Connecticut River
On a blustery, sunny September morning about 20 college students from the University of Hartford gathered on campus to collect garbage from the Park River, which flows though campus.
Spreading out up and down the river under the direction of professor Katherine Owens, the students combed woody patches along the river’s campus floodplain.
“There’s teams of landscapers that work hard to try to make this place look nice,” said Owens. “It’s crazy how much trash is here even with regular cleaning.”
A pair of students emerged from a wooded patch by the river carrying a trash bag full of candy wrappers and yogurt containers.
“There’s a lot of flashy stuff like candy wrappers and what not,” said freshman Kadija Diouf, an architecture major who is planning to add an environmental concentration to her studies. “It’s like a gold mine for us. I love it.”
“The wrappers aren’t like the current ones,” said senior Angie White, a video arts major. “These are from last year.”
Angie pointed into the woods and noted that there was evidence of skunks and other small mammals in the area and they’d probably gotten into the dorm garbage over time.
“We never really think about how much trash people throw away or how much it accumulates over time,” said White. “It’s a big problem for any body of water or any environment period.”
One group of students made a beeline to a secret hangout spot overlooking the river behind a complex of dorms. A pair of biology students picked through the underbrush, finding old plastic bottles and cups.
“Oh my god what, why?” said biology sophomore Michael Piechocki, unraveling a pair of dirty leggings from some bushes above the river. “Yeah, that definitely tops everything.”
Owens studies plastic pollution. She focuses on developing policies that prevent garbage from entering waterways and oceans. She says that a lot of plastic pollution in the Connecticut River is local. Some of it is due to illegal littering and dumping, but a lot more comes from accidental escape from the waste management system.
“It can be anything from an animal getting into public trash bins to the weather to something bouncing off the back of a truck,” says Owens.
She said plugging those holes in the system is important. Once plastic or other pollutants have escaped out to sea, they’re much harder to collect.
Owens and her students weren’t alone. One hundred groups of volunteers armed with trash bags, work gloves and trash tally apps were out in force up and down the Connecticut River watershed as part of the Source to Sea Cleanup Event organized by the CT River Conservancy.
Source To Sea
The volunteers came from all walks of life. Students, families and even groups of coworkers descended on the river, removing tons of trash to donated garbage bins. The Conservancy has been organizing these cleanup events for 26 years. In 2021, 1,394 cleanup volunteers removed 43.3 tons of trash from the river, including a pair of engines.
“At the end of every Source to Sea cleanup we do a trash tally based on
what each groups sends in,” said CT River Conservancy spokesperson Rhea Drozdenko. “We use that in our advocacy to prevent more waste in the future.”
The Connecticut River rises just south of the U.S. border with Quebec in a small pond nestled under the ridge line that geographically ends New Hampshire. That lake is the smallest in a chain of four mountain lakes that comprise the picturesque headwaters of the largest watershed in New England.
On its route to the sea the tiny creek joins 148 tributaries, widening and deepening into the longest artery in New England. Water from roughly 12,000 square miles across five states drains into Long Island Sound.
The silt carried by the river enriches farmland along its banks. At its mouth, the tidelands nurture the beginnings of an estuary that stretches to Hartford.
But rivers don’t just funnel water. Anything that happens to get in the water, from leaked engine oil to stray plastic bags, has a chance of getting in the river.
The Cleanup
CT River Conservancy has enlisted volunteers from as far north as Guildhall, Vt., 30 miles from Canada to Essex, Conn., near the mouth of the river. Each team is doing something a little different. The Essex team, led by Tanya Cutolo, is trying to arrange boats to clean up the shores of Brockway and Nott Islands, which catch a lot of debris from the river.
“We’ve found some pretty large stuff, particularly on Brockway Island,” said Cutolo. “Like tires, there were large pieces of metal.”
For John Hall, a retired minister and founder of the Jonas Center for the Earth in Middletown, the cleanup is in part vocational, a religious calling to take stewardship of the earth.
“The way to Christ calls us to help the people who carry the heaviest burdens in our society,” said Hall. He pointed to urban highways, dumps and the environmental injustice lowincome people face worldwide, despite not causing most of the world’s pollution.
“Our affluence is causing pain and death to people who didn’t produce emissions, just by virtue of where they live. That’s a fundamental injustice in the world the gospel does lead us to consider.”
For Melissa Woodbridge in Guildhall, Vt., it’s just a way to do her part with her neighbors and family. She said she’s always lived on the river and that she wants to keep it clean for her kids.
“This is our global planet, you know,” said Woodbridge. “We can all play an important part. It would be nice for our children to be able to continue enjoying the Connecticut River as we have.”
Heather Geist of the Farmington River Watershed Association said she hoped that efforts like this would help build the kind of connections and awareness for the river to be cared for holistically across state lines. She wants the states to work with local groups and each other for the health of the whole river.
“We do a lot of advocacy and outreach about what you can do in your backyard,” said Geist. “But the bigger picture is hard to grasp “
The bigger picture
The Connecticut River Conservancy says that drawing attention to that is the point of the Source to Sea cleanup.
“The goal is not to have this event at all in the future,” said Drozdenko. “The goal uses this as a way to connect people to the river and have them see what the issues are.”
For environmentalists and river advocates, the cleanup is a way to point out the holes in our waste management system that allows pollution to enter the environment. Drozdenko said that right now their main concerns are tires and “nips,” small single-use bottles for alcohol.
Drozdenko hopes to use the event to help push for producer responsibility legislation, making tire makers responsible for the long-term fate of old tires.
“Right now, there’s not a lot of incentive to recycle or do the right thing (with tires),” said Drozdenko. “Tire producers should be responsible. They should close the loop and make a way for consumers and municipalities to deal with this problem.”