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New England Waterworks Assoc./Earth Day

by Robert Weidknecht
4/27/2010

Keeping rivers and streams clean and trash-free

What a nice surprise! I stopped by the Upper Charles Trail on Saturday and found a crew spending Earth Day cleaning up Hopping Brook, a tributary to the Charles River, and the Upper Charles Trail between Hopping Brook Road and South Street. Some may know that this section of the rail trail was recently purchased by the Town of Holliston in November 2009. 

While Trail Committee members and volunteers have been performing trail cleanups of this section of the Trail since November, none have performed a cleanup to the extent that this volunteer group did. The group was organized by Melissa Simoncini, New England Water Works Association’s Young Professional Committee as part of a National River Cleanup™.

The website for the National River Cleanup™ organization states that “millions of tons of trash end up in our nations streams each year.”  The National River Cleanup™ has reportedly cleaned up 1,000 tons of litter and debris from America’s rivers and streams since 1991. The volunteers for the Holliston section as pictured include Melissa Simoncini, Tara McManus, Lou Soracco, Iseult Kavanagh and some canine assistants. There were four other members helping to cleanup the nearby rivers.

The disturbing part of the cleanup is that much of the litter was recent, including a car battery, car parts, motor oil containers, gas cans, tires, swing sets, and of course plenty of beer cans, trash and other household litter. Hopefully, as the Trail is used more frequently by law-abiding citizens, the littering and dumping will decrease, and our rivers and streams will be cleaner for it.

The Holliston Trails Committee sends out a sincere thank you to New England Water Works Association and especially to the very ambitious Young Professional Committee for their hard work cleaning up Hopping Brook and the Upper Charles Trail.

Comments (1)

Thank you indeed to the Waterworks group and to the Trails Committee for their persistent efforts. I am amazed at the kinds of things that were cleaned out of the area. Thank you so much for working to improve our town.

Mary | 2010-04-28 07:31:45