After collecting nearly 500,000 pounds of mostly small trash items like water bottles and foam-plastic containers during their first three visits, Chad Pregracke's group arrived in Memphis this year ready to take on much bigger pieces of refuse.
"We're pulling up a car today," Pregracke, founder and president of Living Lands & Waters, said Tuesday.
Each year, the Illinois-based group coordinates what it calls an alternative spring break, in which hundreds of student volunteers from across the nation help clean up the Mississippi River. This year, more than 300 students from colleges located from New Hampshire to Texas are scouring the underbrush to gather garbage along McKellar Lake, the city's slack water harbor on the river, in a cleanup that began March 1 and runs through March 20.
They'll be assisted by a sizable barge-mounted crane, a recent acquisition that will enable the group to extract some of the larger items dumped into the Mississippi, including industrial cylinders and a junked car, which Pregracke noticed near the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge during a previous visit.
As in past in past years, the group this month expects to collect at least 150,000 pounds of trash, most of which, being plastic or metal, will be recycled. The volunteers do nearly all their work in McKellar because that's where countless tons of refuse pour in from Nonconnah Creek, a tributary draining large portions of Memphis.
Pregracke, who has led cleanup campaigns on nearly two dozen rivers across the nation, has made Memphis his top priority in recent years because of the volume of waterborne trash here.
"It is, honestly, the worst place I have ever been" in terms of litter, he said.
This year, however, Pregracke described the trash conditions as "unbelievably better," largely because of his group's previous work.
The amount of litter still came as a shock to Spencer Kaaz, 18, a senior at Central High and one of a few local high school students taking part in the cleanup. "I don't think anybody who hasn't been down here knows how bad it is," he said.
Pregracke touted a possible long-term solution to the problem: a device similar to an oil boom that would contain the litter flowing into the lake from Nonconnah.
The boom also is championed by Rocky Morrison, executive director of the Massachusetts-based nonprofit group Clean River Project who is working with Pregracke this year. Morrison has used the booms to corral trash on the Merrimack River in New England and says it could work in McKellar Lake if the city would acquire one.
"It keeps the trash out of the brush," Morrison said. "Once it gets into the brush, it's a handpicking operation."
During a news conference on one of the group's barges Tuesday, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell and Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner John Schroer hailed the cleanup and called upon local citizens to help control the litter problem.
"This trash that you're picking up was put there by us," Luttrell told Pregracke.
Pegracke said he hoped for further improvement in the years to come.
"Honestly, we love Memphis, but we don't want to keep coming back," he said.
