Cleaning Up Delaware River

Cleaning Up Delaware River

October 03.17

by Yung-Le, Hsiao

In “Green and Gray”, we were required to finish stewardship project which is environment rebuilding. This activity of cleaning the river bank was initiated by “United By Blue” and “Natural Lands.” I got these information on blackboard (school website). However, the activity was on Tuesday, which means I have to be absent for Green and Gray during afternoon.

This event started from 4 to 6:30, located at Pier 68.

Before the event started, we signed in order, and enjoy the view of the river while we were waiting .

They also prepared dinner after finishing cleaning up, and it’s totally free.

It is a largest river that I ever seen in my life, hard to believe that is just a river.
freighter passing through

There are gooses live around river bank

Here is also a community of wild cats, people build houses for cats to live here. 

When everyone were here, they started to tell us how did the activity worked.

First of all, there was a competition that we needed to find the most special item, later we guessed what was the weight of the trashes that we have collected that day. The winners will get free membership of  “United By Blue.”

The masses were separated into several groups, and separated into teams who are in charging to pick up recyclable and unrecyclable trashes. I was in the recycling team, so our goal was to pick up bottles and containers. At first I thought that picking up recycles were easier since they were larger and high recognition. However, although bottles were good to find, they were really hard to take. The place that people through them was extremely hard to get in. We need to forth putting different kinds of postures and try our best to get into complex tree trunks, to get those drink containers or plastics. Several times I almost fall down while standing on the trunks or ramps.

(These are all the trash that we found in single group)

Different creepy trash that we found

After working, we have free dinner that night, it was pretty fun really interesting events, people works together and make the environment better. I have spent most of my time at home since I was in high school, gradually I put all my time on city life. The cleaning up event got me chance to visit this awesome place and nature again.