As I look back on the past 25 years of the program, I have seen that some of what we do extends beyond immediate outcomes. One of those was the cleanup of May 7, 2003. It involved members of the Minnesota 4 Wheel Drive Association (MN4WDA). The project was to clean a 27-acre, abandoned, tree-covered rail yard along the river, just east of downtown St. Paul. That event vividly illustrates the importance of committed volunteers involved in natural resource stewardship.

This cleanup marked the beginning of a brownfield restoration used as a textbook example of how such projects should be done. The site of this exemplary project was the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.  The start of the site’s cleanup was a one-day service project that contributed to a project that still attracts investment after 12 years of progress. Fifty-five club members (including family), arrived there on a Wednesday for a 4-hour effort following a normal workday. They shared their expertise with heavy equipment of all kinds. They arrived with six skid loaders, custom-built 4X4 trucks with trailers, and all-terrain vehicles. With the added help of a few homeless tent-dwellers in the area, they winched out rotting, water-soaked trash from the bluff-side caves as well as everything else imaginable from throughout the 27-acre site.

As darkness set in, 37 tires had been removed (half of them mounted), a 30-yard roll-off was filled with demolition debris (including shingles, timbers, patio block, plaster walls and remodeling left-overs), two 30-yard roll-offs filled with general waste (20 bed springs, 6 chairs, 6 sofas, a toilet, carpets,  shelving and two refrigerators, etc.) and a 20 yard roll-off overflowing with scrap metal (bath tubs, barrels, a safe, water heaters, etc.). Cans of discarded paint and oil, a car battery and other chemicals, plus a few dozen railroad ties, topped off the household and industrial hazardous wastes found on site.  Before dark, 3,040 pounds of recyclable metal, 39,500 pounds of general rubbish, and 54,000 pounds of demolition debris had been removed, totaling 96,540 pounds of trash. They gathered trash at the amazing rate of 24,135 pounds per hour!

Joining in with the organizational skills of the Lower Phalen Creek Project (LPCP), the MN4WDA was able to supplement the efforts of the 25 groups coordinated by the LPCP.  For example, Minnesota DNR Metro Greenways had already awarded a grant to the project. That was leveraged by more support from the National Park Service. Public acquisition of the site was completed just six months prior to the May 7th cleanup by the club, and the grand opening of May 21, 2005 was just two years later!  By 2006, over $10 million had been contributed to the effort. A number of groups, along with the MN4WDA, contributed their sweat equity. The dramatic cleanup results coming from the May 7th event provided the first tangible view for what would become the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.

The MN4WDA is but one example of the 650 organizations that, since 1989, have removed over 6.4 million pounds of trash from our public waters through the program.  Prior to the nature-sanctuary project, they staged cleanups on the Minnesota Valley State Trail in Shakopee and the Crosby Farms Regional Park in St. Paul. On other occasions between 2000 and 2012, they did cleanups in an abandoned salvage yard on the Minnesota River at the Belle Plaine State Wayside. These efforts totaled well over 300,000 pounds of salvage-yard trash, including thousands of dollar’s worth of recycled metals. Their most recent effort in Belle Plaine resulted in 10 dumpsters loaded with mixed metals and demolition debris. The value of the retrieved scrap metals actually produced a payment of $2,770 over the costs of transport and disposal.

The physical transformation of the “huge mess” that once described the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary began with a volunteer cleanup on May 7, 2003. The volunteers, from an off-road vehicle recreation association, worked strictly as a community service.  The effort powerfully demonstrates how partnerships across groups and agencies can result in rapid positive change and great momentum. For a recap of what the site is like currently, a nine-part video on the Lower Phalen Creek Project website has been produced. It illustrates how far things have come in the restoration of the site. It also shows how the Adopt-a-River program can play a part in an on-going cause greater than itself.

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The 2014 Mississippi Riverboat Cleanup - despite a postponement after being flooded out - was a great success! 

Volunteers boarded the Jonathan Padelford river boat to clean up the east bank of the Mississippi River, just north of the Wacota Bridge in St. Paul. The volunteers had plenty to clean after the 6th highest historic flood level in St. Paul. The 13 foot surge of flood waters washed in plastic bottles, Styrofoam, tires, and even a dashboard of a car! Old tires and a vintage refrigerator were also retrieved during the cleanup. One of our volunteers had gotten a jump-start on the cleanup months earlier by gathering tires strewn throughout nearby backwaters. They were recycled with the help of Metropolitan Mosquito Control District.

Despite a third of our cleanup area being underwater, 100 people worked together to fill a 30-yard dumpster with 4,800 pounds of trash. This is the first year we have recycled the materials collected during the cleanup. The volunteers extra effort to separate recyclables from trash resulted in a third of the recovered materials being recycled! 

If you would like to volunteer at next year's riverboat cleanup, email Ana Vang at analeisha.vang@state.mn.us or call (651) 259-5620. 

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Every year since 1994, the Adopt-a-River program has commissioned an artist to create an outdoor sculpture made of found objects (aka "trash") and displayed at the Minnesota State Fair near the DNR building. Each sculpture is made from a variety of materials gathered from actual river cleanup sites.

This year’s sculpture, created by Tristan Kyrsta, was Lepus Ex Apparatus (Rabbit from the Machine). It was well received by fairgoers and was highlighted frequently by the media. One of the fair-goers commented, "Thank you for doing this! Promotes great awareness - we need to be kind to our river!"

This year we had 50 people dedicating their time to the exhibit, covering all 12 days of the fair.It was an especially exciting year as two daily attendance records were set (Tuesday, August 26th and Saturday, August 30th) as well as the overall attendance record (1.8 million visitors).

Adopt-a-River volunteers were able to place information with 3,900 visitors. In addition, they signed up volunteers for upcoming cleanups, took written reactions to the sculpture, and gathered email addresses for our newsletter. Some members of the public made personal commitments to adopting their own portion of shoreline to cleanup. We were able to fulfill our purpose for being at the fair: to encourage more people to consider personal involvement in the care of their public water resources. Because of our volunteers, more people are now committed to seeing that the items found in the sculpture do not find their way to the river.

It takes all kinds of people to make the river a better place, and our state fair volunteer participation helped build our community’s quality of life. If you would like to volunteer at next year's state fair, email Ana Vang at analeisha.vang@state.mn.us or call (651) 259-5620. 

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Although a bulk of our 3,400 cleanups have been based on land, a certain number of them are water-based. If you want to experience the fun of a truly water-based cleanup, but lack paddling experience, we have just the program for you: I Can Paddle! 

The DNR offers programs designed to provide first-time paddlers with the skills they need to enjoy a lifetime of paddling.  The I Can Paddle! program, made available through Legacy Amendment funds, is a great way to get people out on the water for the first time. Experienced guides and small group sizes mean participants get the individualized attention they need to become paddling pros in no time.

The 2014 I Can Paddle! season was a huge success, with record registrations and attendance. Over 500 people participated in I Can Paddle! programs this past summer. Some of the most recent success can be credited to the expansion of the I Can Paddle! program into Standup Paddleboarding (SUP). SUP programs were offered this year for the first time as part of the I Can Paddle! program and were extremely popular among participants.

Programs are offered statewide on some of our state’s most stunning lakes and rivers.  Registration is not yet available for 2015 programs, but keep an eye on our website for schedule announcements and registration information. 

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We've all seen plastic bags blown from trash cans, floating along highways, and stuck in debris piles in rivers, but where does all this plastic go? In the last Cleanup Review we discussed the Great Lakes gyres, which are plastic particle concentrations caught in large currents that accumulate into large masses. 

Researchers from Western University in Canada have also discovered that our plastic bags, bottles, and cutlery are ending up in rock formations. It's even happening enough that the bizarre combination of rock, sand, seashells, coral, and plastic has been given its own geologic name: plastiglomerate. 

Plastiglomerate forms when plastic melts, then cools, acting as a cement between the other components of the rock. Plastiglomerate can then sink and make its way to the ocean floor, where - when the conditions are right - may be preserved in the geologic record. 

While the researchers believe that most plastiglomerates are formed when humans light fires while camping or fishing, it's easy to imagine how other heat sources (lava flows, wildfires, etc.) could also create plastiglomerates. 

As Adopt-a-River volunteers, you've all cleaned plastic bags, bottles, and toys from our waters. Let's go one step further and keep plastics from entering our waterways in the first place. Make a commitment to reduce, reuse, recycle, and help keep Minnesota clean. The more that we get involved, the more we can keep plastics and other debris out of the water, off our landscape, and absent from the geologic strata to be studied as curiosities by future geologists. 

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The Minnesota Water Trails Tourism Summit, which took place in St. Cloud on Sept. 29 and 30, brought together over 140 community representatives and paddling enthusiasts from across the country. The summit was the first of its kind in the nation, bringing together tourism and outdoor recreation interests to build communities’ capacity to promote paddle sports.

At the summit, 75 attendees paddled the Beaver Islands area of the Mississippi River, a stretch designated Wild and Scenic stretch of the river south of the dam in St. Cloud. The flotilla of kayakers and canoeists stopped for two educational talks by experts. 

Paul Nordell pleaded with the paddlers to be on the look-out for trash on the trip. The tire on the right was taken into custody by Levi Plath (DNR PAT Sauk Rapids), who received it from one of the canoeists who had accepted the Adopt-a-River challenge to retrieve some trash as a token of appreciation for the otherwise breath-taking beauty of the Beaver Islands section of the river.   

Other attendees visited the St. Cloud Outdoor Endeavors program and Clear Waters Outfitting Company to learn more about the economic impacts of paddle sports.