Sycamore Greenway Friends: It's a park, not a landfill!

All this fall the Greenway has had a crew of hardworking volunteers from Iowa Master Naturalists and Johnson County Master Gardeners coming out on Sundays to cut woody brush along the trail. This past Sunday, as we wrapped up regularly scheduled sessions for the season, the team ventured over to nearby Whispering Meadows Wetland Park, where the low water level after a stretch of rain-free days revealed a massive amount of litter collected in the pond.

Palm-sized (actual) clamshells
also found in the pond.

Both due to its location and its geography, Whispering Meadows is a magnet for trash blowing and flowing in from the nearby apartments and highway. Like the Sycamore Greenway, Whispering Meadows serves as stormwater management for nearby neighborhoods: as the stormwater flows through it carries anything found in its path through parking lots and roadside gutters: plastic water bottles, beverage cans, plastic bags, tires, plastic clamshells, glass bottles, and more were laboriously pulled out of the heavy muck, bagged, and stacked for the city to haul away.

The work was both discouraging and rewarding: the sheer amount of trash made for an easy and obvious "before and after" contrast. Each container was filled with heavy, wet mud that had to be shaken loose, or they would weigh down the bags to be hauled around the pond. The work was done under the noisy supervision and disapprobation of several Canada geese, with nearly half the shoreline being tidied in 90 minutes of intense effort.

If you aren't a supporter of a strong and effective National Bottle Bill, regular trash cleanups will almost certainly make you a convert. Imagine each of those water bottles, each of those beer cans and liquor bottles, with a quarter deposit...how many would end up in the muck?

Pond snails make use of
unconventional habitat

If you don't think that single-use plastics are a problem...start picking up litter in your neighborhood. Pull dozens, hundreds of stinking plastic bags out of the mud along your local rivers and ponds, and see if you change your mind.

As we head into a holiday season that is often celebrated with a massive amount of consumption and its related packaging waste, spend a moment considering where that trash ends up and what that means for our communities and our planet. Maybe after one of those holiday meals, grab a bag and go for a walk around your neighborhood to collect wayward trash before it ends up in a waterway.

But enough soapboxing. There aren't enough thanks to do justice to the efforts of volunteers Joel, Linda, Rhonda, and Patrick, sacrificing their time (and their shoes) to help improve our natural spaces here in Iowa City. Many thanks also to Tyler and the City of Iowa City for consistently supporting volunteer efforts to make our city a great place to live.