(ABC 6 News) — All along the Shell Rock River, fleets of canoes have been picking up every kind of trash imaginable that came down the river.It’s part of an initiative by Iowa’s Project AWARE to clean up rivers in the area to help the environment.“There’s things coming out of that river that I would have never have expected, tires, big tires, little tires, we’ve seen barbed wire come out, the cans, the glass, we’ve seen fuel store tanks, big rusty barrel,” said Steve Scaaf, a Proj...
(ABC 6 News) — All along the Shell Rock River, fleets of canoes have been picking up every kind of trash imaginable that came down the river.
It’s part of an initiative by Iowa’s Project AWARE to clean up rivers in the area to help the environment.
“There’s things coming out of that river that I would have never have expected, tires, big tires, little tires, we’ve seen barbed wire come out, the cans, the glass, we’ve seen fuel store tanks, big rusty barrel,” said Steve Scaaf, a Project AWARE volunteer.
The project has been ongoing for years, and it has given volunteers some funky stories to tell.
“A cooler that someone dumped, but it was full of like rotting meat that someone found, so I didn’t find it, but what we had to do was float it down with our canoe,” said another volunteer, Owen Soenen.
Several volunteers began their journey in Nora Springs early Thursday morning, traveling 10 miles down the Shell Rock and ending their journey in Rockford. Once there, they sorted the collected trash to send to various disposal sites across Iowa.
“So we really try to recycle everything that we have, to make sure that we are being as sustainable as possible, and to really make sure that we aren’t harming the ecosystem either, cause what’s the point of taking out the trash if you are just gonna put it somewhere else right?” said Jenna Pfeiffer, the event director for Project AWARE.
Pfeiffer says the project is about more than just caring for the river.
“We want to make sure that our volunteers know why this is important right? We can put them out on the water, but we also need to teach them about water conservation in general because it’s not just the trash right? It’s runoff, it’s nitrates, it’s anything you can think of.”
Project AWARE has officially pulled 1 million pounds of trash from Iowa rivers over the course of 22 years, and it is only possible because of the hundreds of volunteers who show up on a yearly basis.
To learn more about Project AWARE, click here.