Although we had to press pause on cleanups starting in March, Waterway Keepers still had a very successful year of keeping our streets and creeks clean. Through 9 public cleanups, we collected a total of 3,769 pounds of trash. That’s 2,540 pounds of landfill trash, 1,034 pounds of recycling, and 195 pounds of compost.
Before COVID-19 challenged us with new restrictions and protocols, we were about to expand the Waterway Keepers program on a regular basis to the City of St Helena, through a partnership with Sustainable St Helena. In the future we will continue to foster this relationship.
We had also started planning for a multi-agency cleanup and service project in American Canyon, in partnership with Napa Open Space District, City of American Canyon, American Canyon Community and Parks Foundation, and Napa RCD. When the current restrictions ease, we will continue to expand the Waterway Keepers way of life throughout the county.
This year’s Earth Day looked very different from usual. The Environmental Education Coalition of Napa County (EECNC) put together an online platform as a way for the community to still engage with environmental actions while keeping their physical distance. Instead of hosting a city-wide community cleanup, we encouraged people to pick up trash in and around their neighborhoods and local parks, asking them to tag us on social media or email us their photos of what they found. We heard anecdotally from a few people who joined in, but the overall engagement with the online platform wasn’t enough to get a real handle on how many people participated.
This fall, Coastal Cleanup Day 2020 is also going to look very different from the past. The California Coastal Commission may host a Coastal Cleanup month instead of day, because of the COVID-19 restrictions that will most likely still be in place in September and also because each year there are multiple other events on the same day, so that some are prohibited from participating in this one. In any case, the Coastal Commission will be encouraging people to use the app instead of paper cards for data collection, and we will all be looking into ways to avoid large crowds. Here in Napa County, our individual sites draw anywhere from 15 to 100 people, so we will work on reducing those numbers.
One thing we can be sure of is that our community is still excited about reducing trash in our waterways, and we are all grateful for that. We will continue to steward our county’s waterways, no matter what is thrown our way!
-Ashley Kvitek, Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator
