Thursday, September 9, 2010

Sudbury River - Kellogg St. to Rt. 9 and Back

This morning's trash patrol was on the Sudbury River in Framingham.  I launched at Kellogg Street and paddled upriver to Route 9 and back.  The highway looks fairly small when viewed from the river.  The same can be said of the river when viewed from the highway.
I passed this shore fisherman along the way.  He wasn't saying anything about how he caught that good-sized bass...

His friend was rather stoic as well...



This bathtub looked strangely similar to the one in that Cialis TV ad.  Here, however, something must have gone horribly wrong...



I returned back to Kellogg Street with a haul of 97 pieces of trash.  They posed briefly...

Today's haul was made up of 44 recyclable containers (3 redeemable) and 53 pieces of miscellaneous rubbish such as a large winter coat, numerous plastic bags, styrofoam cups, and a few nip bottles.
My YTD total stands at 4732.

Last month I had the pleasure of being accompanied on a trash patrol by journalist, Maureen Costello.  At the time I was anxious that there might not be any trash to recover.  However, trash turned out to be plentiful but water to paddle in was in very short supply.  Maureen subsequently wrote an article about my trash paddling efforts that appears in today's Boston Globe Metro West edition.  It can be read at this link


4 comments:

Erik Eckilson said...

Congratulations Al – is a great article, and recognition well deserved

Erik

Anonymous said...

The cialis bath tub picture and comment are pricless.

I read your blog every week or so and really enjoy it.

Chris Gill

Jan Galkowski said...

Mr Peirce,

Do you have or can you keep a spreadsheet (Excel or OpenOffice) logging your trips, lengths, starts and stops, days done, and counting the number of pieces of trash of various kinds as you do in your blog? I'm thinking this might be interesting to look at over time and place to try to estimate how much trash there is overall (what you didn't collect), whether the amounts are changing, seasonal and river variations, and such. I'm a statistician, actually, an engineer working as an applied mathematician of sorts. I'm active with both the Westwood Environmental Action Committee (WEAC) and South Shore Recycling Cooperative.

Thanks.

Please feel free to contact me directly, ch@mm.st

Al said...

Jan, In regards to your question concerning spreadsheets, I do keep one. It is really more of a database on Excel. Items tracked are date, town, river, miles of river patrolled, quantities of non-redeemables, redeemables, misc. rubbish, and total trash for the patrol. The one for 2009 is complete, the one for 2010 is set through May and needs to be updated with recent data. I use it mostly to determine percentages of the different types of trash.