1600 Pounds of Trash in One Morning

 Molly, Mary, Geoff, Chris, Beth, and Kate. Zach took the photo--and picked up the heaviest bag of trash!

When you join a group that picks up 1600+ pounds of trash in one morning, it makes you feel as if you're at least trying to make a difference!

Team SpinSheet did some trash talkin together today in a collaborative effort with Back Creek Conservancy to pick up trash for Project Clean Stream, a Bay wide effort to clean up the shorelines, with 50,000 volunteers.

About 40 volunteers (seven from Team SpinSheet) met at the Back Creek Nature Park in the rain to sign in and divide and conquer the shoreline of our home creek. Our team scoured the area from Annapolis Maritime Museum up to the Eastport Post Office and filled seven garbage bags with anything from Coors Light cans (one of them full) to an empty, moss-covered backpack.

 Guess where this drain leads? Right into our creek.

The streets of Eastport were rather clean, a pleasant surprise--but MAN are there a lot of cigarette butts on the ground. It was eye opening to do this in the rain and watch the butts flow directly from the sidewalk, to the stream along the side of the road, and right into the drains that took them straight into Back Creek.

Mears Marina gets a huge gold star for being incredibly clean (all we found was a twist tie and one bottle cap). Davis' Pub does their best to provide buckets for cigarette butts out front as well as a recycling bin across the street.

The worst of the trash was where it could collect in a pocket--under a ramp or in the shallows and weeds. When the water warms up, we'll do kayak and paddleboard cleanups and welcome local readers to join in the effort.