[OKC] Last Saturday's Lake Overholser Clean-Up

Tue Apr 27 16:43:19 PDT 2010

Jennifer Alig

**My email has changed to Jennifer.Alig at deq.ok.gov.**

From: ok-sus-bounces at lists.oksustainability.org [mailto:ok-sus-bounces at lists.oksustainability.org] On Behalf Of Miles, Karen
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 3:39 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: [ok-sus] Last Saturday's clean-up

I would like to thank all of you who made last Saturday's clean-up of Lake Overholser and the Stinchcomb Wildlife Refuge such a success!  I hope y'all had fun!

I'm trying to find a way to be able to share photos with you from the event.  If you took photos, can you e-mail them to me?

It is amazing how this clean-up has grown from just 12 people the first year I organized it, to around 30 the second year, to 60 the third year, to 75 the fourth year, and now for the 5th Annual Lake Overholser and Stinchcomb Wildlife Refuge Clean-up we had a grand total of.....drum roll please..... 125 volunteers!!!!

For the third year, we enjoyed BBQ from Earl's BBQ and hamburgers from the Cimarron Steakhouse.  A new addition this year was the donation of vegetarian subs from Jersey Mike's in the Westgate Shopping Center located at SW 3rd and Rockwell.

For the third year, we had people in canoes and kayaks.  But instead of the two people who joined us two years ago, this group grew to at least 16 folks.  Many thanks to Dave at OKC Kayaks and Rodney Boegel who took it upon himself to organize the flotilla which took a load off of me!

A big thanks to Chesapeake Energy who supplied a grant to help make this even possible as well as supplying volunteers.  DEQ's Green Team also provided a grant to cover many of the lunch items such as charcoal for the hamburgers and OFF to ward off the Stinchcomb ticks.  Since I have been doing this as an unpaid volunteer with no funding, these grants made it possible to provide t-shirts to our team leaders, heavy duty gloves, and grabbers to get that hard to reach trash.  Though I still had to pay for some expenses out of my pocket, support with these grants, as well as all the items donated, helped me to be able to provide things to everybody for a fun clean-up.  (Though many of us work at DEQ and DEQ provides some material support, there is no funding through them, and we participate in the clean-up on our own time.)

I would also like to thank the many businesses who provided so many items to all the volunteers including Planet, the Grateful Bean Café, Celebration Station, Chick-fil-A, Sonic, and all the others who provided the 70+ give-away gifts.  Please patronize the businesses that were on the handout you were given to encourage them to participate next year. 

It was great to see volunteers who have participated for about the past four years along with many others who were participating for the first time.  This year we had Sierra Club members, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Chesapeake Volunteers, DEQ volunteers, Texas Roadhouse volunteers, and others who heard about the clean-up in a variety of ways.

Rodney said that he estimated that about 2 tons of trash was collected.  I'm not good about guessing weights so I was very glad that this year we were able to sort the recyclables that had been collected in the white bags, rebag them, then weigh each bag before putting them in the roll-out that Waste Management provided for our recyclables.  In terms of recyclables, here is how much we kept out of the landfill:

Plastic: 177 pounds

Aluminum: 63 pounds

Glass: 198 pounds

In addition to the ¼ ton of plastic/aluminum/glass that we kept out, we also were able to retrieve 11 tires for recycling (unfortunately we can't recycle to tires that still had the rims in them).  This was great!  Though I didn't weigh the recyclables last year, there was a noticeably larger amount this year.  I was also very encouraged to see just 11 tires.  The first year of this clean-up, the 12 of us had at least 20 tires.  Overall, I am seeing an improvement.  When I first took my dogs for a walk on the Overholser Trails or in Stinchcomb, I had to always take a plastic bag with me for all the trash I found.  That didn't make the walk very fun and was the reason I decided to focus on these areas for the first Litter Blitz I participated in.  Now these areas overall are much better since we keep chipping away at them and the "hidden" dump piles in Stinchcomb every year.

Since I was so busy with all the details of the clean-up, I didn't have much of a chance to talk to most of you.  I would really appreciate your feedback about the clean-up including what you liked and didn't like.  (I'm sorry about no eating utensils.  They have provided them in the past and somehow got overlooked this time.  The person I had worked with at Earl's was not there that day since he had to be in Norman to cater for the concrete canoe races.)

I would also like to know what the most unusual item was that you found during the clean-up.

Though I agree that it would be nice to pick up items out in these areas more than once a year, I cannot plan for an event of this scale more often than once a year since I am not a committee and there is only so much I can do - especially since many places just give support because it is Earth Week.  But if people want to meet another time to just pick up trash, I probably have enough bags for that.

Thank you again for all your help and don't forget to send any photos you took!

Karen Miles 

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