United By Blue is a wonderful local Philadelphia company that is working hard to cleanup creek – river trash. Bartram’s Garden, along the Schuylkill River, has been one of their cleanup sites so I decided to check out the bank trash for myself.
I 1st visited Bartram’s on 8/10 and made a repeat visit on 9/3. Here is a slide show of my bank trash findings along the Bartram’s Garden’s 3,000 foot stretch of tidal Schuylkill River bank.
(Click any slide to start show. Press x in upper left corner to return to post)
PDF available here.
Yes Philadelphia, in addition to the Tacony-Frankford Creek, we have a Schuylkill River trash problem. Plastic bottle-food wrappers-food container litter is being carried to the River by run-off during rain storms upstream of Philadelphia and in the City.
Our plastic trash is building up on our shore lines and in the N Atlantic gyre.
Plastic street litter is a serious water pollution problem that we must through product controls, litter prevention, street cleaning and waterway cleanups. Right now we are losing the fight against marine debris.