“I have been sweeping the creek’s bike path between Piney Branch and Riggs Road nearly twice a week since March. Initially I was using gloves. Several people remarked that they stopped picking up trash due to Covid concerns. So I decided to use this reacher for “touchless” trash pick-up. Reach-squeeze-and-place-in-a-bag or bucket as you go. Google “reachers / grabbers” to see where you can easily purchase one of your own. It takes a village to keep our environment clean.”

–Marian B.

Chris Lancette and Won-ok Kim swept Sligo Creek near the Wheaton Stormwater Ponds. Chris reports via their website, Eyeonsligocreek.com, on one of their recent Sweeps:

“We picked up a brewery’s worth of beer cans and bottles, heaps of plastic water bottles, and ubiquitous plastic bags — including some that barely poked out from the creek banks. We tugged at them like magicians pulling unending handkerchiefs from our sleeves. It can take one thousand years for a single bag to decompose. We removed drinking straws, broken glass, face masks, latex gloves and diapers. Plastic diapers take five centuries to break down.

We retrieved the remnants of an entire meal in one spot — the plastic carton from a frozen dinner, an empty hot sauce packet and an aluminum beverage can.

We scooped up what was left of a leather piece of Nike sporting equipment, then turned our heads to find a man’s leather loafer — a poignant sign of man’s callous footprint on the watershed.

The winding lips of the stream banks still near and sometimes above our heads, we couldn’t see what was ahead, and what was ahead couldn’t see us, either.

We rounded a corner and …

A startled adult great blue heron and an immature heron flapped themselves up and out of the creek and high into the autumn sky. Won-ok and I reveled in the sight of the two majestic birds as they circled the retention ponds and soared to the horizon.”