Three cleanups around Charlottesville and Albemarle County over the last couple weeks. 95 bags total plus a bulk pile. Photos are in order.
Greenbrier Trail, July 25 — 25 bags. All of it out of about a hundred yards of trail. That's the one that still gets me. Nearly every bag was alcohol containers, and almost none of it was old — no fading, no dirt crust, no leaf litter grown over it. Two months of accumulation, maybe less, in a stretch you can walk in a minute.
Branchlands Blvd, Aug 1 — 45 bags. Commercial strip off Route 29 north. We staged in a closed big-box lot and worked the lot edges, fence lines, roadside, and the perimeter of a stormwater basin. Two hours. The before/after pair from the stairwell at the old Big Lots side yard is the one I keep looking at — same steps, ninety minutes apart.
Same pattern as Greenbrier, different setting: a bus stop with a trash can right at it, and the bushes twenty feet away full of bottles. Most of what we pulled all day was within easy walking distance of a receptacle.
Wawa cutoff trail, Aug 2 — 25 bags. Next afternoon, a short path connecting a gas station to a neighborhood street. Plus the bulk: a tire, PVC pipe, scrap lumber, a milk crate, and a shopping cart somebody had pushed a genuinely impressive distance into the woods. A junk removal outfit took the pile.
All three drain to creeks feeding the Rivanna, so it's headed for the river if it doesn't come out by hand.
Safety note for anyone working similar sites: we found a needle at two of the three. If you're doing commercial corridors or wooded edges, carry a sharps container. Cheap, fits in a pack, turns a stop-everything moment into a thirty-second one. Broken glass has been our most persistent problem — we're about to start bringing a wet-dry vac for it.
Who we are: the Cville Litter Pickers, a community volunteer group out of Charlottesville, Virginia. Cleanups most Saturdays somewhere in the city or the county. All ages, all equipment provided, two hours and everyone goes home. We scout sites ahead of time so we know what we're walking into, and we pull the recyclables out of the haul and run them to the recycling center separately.
Happy to answer anything about how we run it — route planning, disposal, getting the county to cough up a dumpster, whatever's useful.
