On April 15, 2023, volunteers working from land and water at 10 sites along Little Hunting Creek picked up 144 bags of trash and recyclables, seven tires, seven shopping carts, and plenty of bulk trash.
Thanks to site leaders Will Friedman (First River Farms), Jennifer Giunta (Brady Street), Mark Miller (Wessynton), Donna Stauffer and Carrie Howe (Fort Hunt Elementary School), Greg Crider (Col. John Byers Park), Bryan Birch (Gum Springs), Owen Matthews (Mount Vernon Plaza), Jose Rodriguez (Audubon Estates), and Dalton Bisson (Janna Lee Avenue Bridge). The last three sites were organized by Senator Scott Surovell and Delegate Paul Krizek. Our heartfelt appreciation and thanks to site leaders and organizers, and to all 98 volunteers.
Some History
We have cleaned up Little Hunting Creek every year since 2002, except 2020, during the pandemic.
Almost 2,000 volunteers working on land and from the water have collected over 4,000 bags of trash and recyclables, over 300 tires, over 200 shopping carts, and hundreds of tons of bulk trash since 2006.
Early on, we focused exclusively on sites south of Richmond Highway, in Riverside Estates, Gum Springs, First River Farms, Stratford Landing, Stratford on the Potomac, and Wessynton. They were trashy enough, but in 2011 we ventured north of Richmond Highway for the first time, to attempt to clean up the overwhelming amount of trash near Janna Lee Avenue bridge.
That turned out to be a years-long effort.
The appalling amount of trash inspired (if that’s the right word) then-Delegate Scott Surovell to begin organizing his own cleanups in trash hotspots north of Richmond Highway in 2012. Thanks to his efforts, the number of cleanup volunteers almost doubled and the amount of trash pulled out of the creek reached truly heroic levels from 2012 through 2016.
The graph tells the story…
In 2012, we discovered a shopping cart graveyard downstream of the Janna Lee Avenue bridge, where 149 Walmart shopping carts had been dumped and were embedded in the creek bottom. Each one had to be winched out of the mud and hauled out to the road (thanks to Robert O’Hanlon) where it could be hauled off by the county’s big crane.
Advocacy and Action
During all this time we have not picked up trash and litter year after year without complaint. Far from it. We began to advocate for county and state actions to reduce the amount of litter getting into the creek in the first place. The Mount Vernon Council of Citizens Associations adopted a Citizens’ Action Plan for Litter Prevention in 2011. We formed the Trash Action Work Force with Friends of Accotink Creek and other groups, and organized protests at the International Bottled Water Association and Nestles. We asked them to take more responsibility for ensuring their products are properly disposed of, and drop their opposition to bottle deposit laws.
Our elected representatives introduced and eventually passed bills to charge a fee for single-use plastic bags (Senator Ebbin and Delegate Lopez) and to permit the county to remove abandoned shopping carts and charge the owner for the cost of disposal (Senator Surovell), although the county has yet to adopt an ordinance to implement the law. The state litter tax was increased (Delegate Krizek). The county took steps to reduce litter, by installing a trash trap behind Mount Vernon Plaza, and by instituting Operation Stream Shield, a program that hires shelter residents to clean the trash out of streams. Operation Stream Shield has made a large and visible difference in the amount of trash we see in the creek. And the bag fee works!
These new laws and programs have helped reduce the amount of trash in Little Hunting Creek. We are very grateful to our elected representatives for taking steps to restore Little Hunting Creek to its natural (untrashed) beauty. We who live along the creek can see the difference, and the graph above confirms that trash is declining.
What’s Next?
The improvement shows up in sites that were once trash-filled, but are no longer. For example, every year volunteers used to pick up dozens of bags of trash in the Little Hunting Creek Preserve (in Stratford Landing) and in Little Hunting Creek Park (First River Farms), but no longer. As a result, volunteers have turned their attention to removing English ivy, Wintercreeper, Japanese honeysuckle, and other exotic invasive vines that threaten trees and displace native plants, and to projects to improve creek access to nearby neighbors.
Yet, even with the improvements, there’s still too much trash in the creek–especially bottle litter. After all, 100 bags of trash and litter collected every year is still a lot of trash, even if it’s a quarter of what we picked up during the peak years a decade ago.
What’s left to do?—Pass a bottle deposit law!
