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Every year, there's litter that
comes from people, obviously.
Some of it's wind blown from winter storms,
but a lot of people just leave their coffee cups and bottles.
We have tires in the water, we've found a lot of things.
So every year, we have a crew of a couple hundred people
who come and we've made our own
kind of tools. Let me just show you what these are.
This is a 10 foot piece of PVC pipe and we've clipped
on the end a plate and bolted it through and
put some bolts through here, and that's so you can
reach from the shoreline pretty far out.
You can only reach so far and we have helping us on
our cleanup day the Bass Federation, Bass fisherfolk,
and they come in their rowboats and come up close to
the shore and push litter and trash into us.
So this is good for bottles, bags and big things.
And then there's a whole lot of smaller litter
that we designed this little basket with a hoop to scoop.
And at some point, the particulate matter is so fine
that either of these things don't work, we've taken a
5 gallon bucket and poked it full of holes and what
we'll do is we'll pull up the leaves and litter,
the bottle caps and let that drain.
So you really want to make sure that you're not putting
your hands, even with these heavy duty gloves, directly
into the muck that you can't see, because there are
sharp materials, including "sharps", hypodermic needles,
unfortunately, and there's a good chance you could get
poked, poke yourself. Like I said, what we're going
to do is use the bucket to take the muck out, spread it
on the grass and rake through it, then put it into bags.
That way there we're being safe about it.
So we can reach out and bring in the bottles,
like that, and you have all kinds of things.
Plastic bags, here's a little whiskey bottle.
Now this rake works like a regular rake, and you can pull
all this stuff along. Again, so you can see what's in there,
be careful not to get poked by anything sharp.
Hypodermic needle, that's why you can't run your hands
through that. Very dangerous.
So on Saturday, we'll have sharps containers...
for the moment, I'll just put it in this bottle.
Plastic bottles, we've got glass.
You know, every year we do this and every year we take
out about this much.
So, the message is not getting out to everybody,
to stop littering. It really chokes the wildlife,
and unless we take it out, it will be here for
a thousand years.
So what we're going to do too is we've got cutters,
"loppers", we're going to cut some of this brush away
so we can get at the trash.
I'm Dante, and I'm Claire
and we're from OSEEC, and right now we're
walking around the Roger Williams Park. This is Polo
Pond, or Polo Lake, and we're seeing tons of trash
around here. And we're doing some surveying for our
cleanup that is on Earth Day, April 21st. And we are
trying to see what the area's like for all
of our wonderful volunteers that are going to come
help us clean us. We're very excited. See you out there!
[laughter]