The 16th annual Riversweep took place on Saturday, Oct. 6. Over the years, participating in this event has allowed the Lake Wylie community to make progress in reducing the amount of trash in the lake. Even with this progress, the need for an annual clean up remains. Heavy rains have compounded the usual, seasonal load of washed up trash, litter and debris. This has increased the urgency for the Sweep.
The Catawba Riverkeeper and the Lake Wylie Marine Commission organize the Riversweep each year. This event was an eye-opening volunteer opportunity to clean up Lake Wylie. Residents from all around the lake and nearby communities who care about maintaining a clean and healthy environment came together to pick up trash.
Regardless of whether someone is a new participant or an experienced Riversweep volunteer, it was easy to go and lend a hand for a few hours, meet like-minded people, go for a boat ride and have a great time.
When I arrived at the lake, I walked up to the sign-in table and told the man working the tent my name and my t-shirt size. Everyone who attended the event received a light blue t-shirt that said Riversweep on the front and Lake Wylie RiverSweep on the back in dark blue letters. Every participant put on their new blue shirts to start the clean up. The man in charge of the tent separated the volunteers into different groups to board the boats. We got assigned into groups and put onto a boat to ride over to the islands.
The boat rides were calm, and the temperature was cool with a slight breeze. As we rode over to the islands, all of us talked and got to know each other and discussed why we all decided to attend this event.
At the clean up, I met a couple of students from York Tech, including Camryn Mccoy, a freshman biology major,.
“I like to help the environment in any way I can, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that. My class was offering bonus points, so that was helpful too. Mccoy enjoys nature, especially “seeing how things interact with each other, how different species interact with other species, how they react to their environment and how they adapt.”
After cleaning up trash on a couple of different islands, we had filled a decent amount of orange trash bags.
“There was more trash than I thought. When we first got off of the boat we didn’t really see a lot of trash, but by the end we had about ten bags of trash. It was crazy how much trash can collect on a little island,” Mccoy said.
As all of us searched through the trees and leaves to find and pick up trash, we found some surprising items in the forests. “There was a bottle and a vine had grown through the bottle since it had been there for so long. For us to get the bottle we had to cut the vine; it was horrible to see that the nature had adapted to the litter,” Mccoy said.
Taylor Gregory, a York Tech sophomore Marine Biology major, attended the Lake Wylie Riversweep. “I just love helping the environment and in being a marine biology major, it is important to keep the earth as clean as we can,” Gregory said.
“We didn’t see a lot of trash at first, but the deeper we got into the island the more stuff we saw that had been there for a long time,” Gregory said.
Kendall Lentz, an English instructor at York Tech, came to the Riversweep alongside her students.
“Dr. Morgan, who teaches biology at York Tech, introduced us to the idea for our class, and I thought it sounded like fun to get out and ride a boat and help the community by picking up trash,” Lentz said.
Lentz’s observations were different than Mccoy and Gregory’s discoveries because she was dropped off on different islands than her students.
“There’s not a ton of trash that we have seen, luckily, but we did find some interesting things. I found a pillow and just some other random things,” Lentz said.
Lake Wylie, beautified, cleaned, restored, which was displayed on the back of every volunteer’s t-shirt was the event coordinators’ main goal. A couple of women involved in the Catawba Cruiser Kayak Group attended the event. Kim Dellinger, a corporate paralegal at First Tennessee Bank, decided to come to the Riversweep in support of her kayak group. “This is something that the cruisers are always involved in, and we’re on the lake all the time, so I just thought this was a good cause, and I’ve been doing it for six or eight years,” Dellinger said. She emphasized her goal in helping out was “to have a cleaner place to paddle and pick up the trash so the animals don’t get entangled in it.”
In being a part of the kayak group and helping out the community by attending this event, Dellinger hopes that “people will not leave as much trash because when they get somewhere where it is clean they won’t just add more trash to it because it is bad for the animals.”
Gale Mckinna, a retired school teacher after 35 years, is another member of the Catawba Cruiser Kayak Group.Her main purpose for helping clean up the trash was “to keep the animals from getting tangled up in the trash… I wish people would carry their trash out when they leave the islands and lake.”
At the end of the morning, we threw each full orange trash bag into a huge garbage bin. We counted each bag as we threw them in, and our group totaled to 21 bags of trash.
Attending this event has given me a perspective that we should be more mindful of our surroundings. If you see trash on the ground don’t be afraid to pick it up and throw it away. It truly helps out the environment and makes our earth a cleaner and safer place.
If you are interested in attending the next Riversweep or want to learn more about the ‘Sweep visit http://www.lakewylieriversweep.com.
