
This past weekend I participated in the 22nd annual Trinity River Trash Bash. For the Trash Bash, the city is divided into seven different sections. Groups, families and individuals can choose any one location to volunteer to pick up trash along the banks. Several hundred people sign up for each location and make quick work of picking up a mountain of trash. Our marketing coordinator, Elizabeth, found a barrel floating on the bank and got the nod for biggest piece of trash collected!
Most of the trash we gathered consisted of plastic drink bottles and fast food wrappings. It gets there via the storm water drainage system, which starts at the curb of the street. If a plastic bottle is in the curb in front of your house, and no one picks it up, it ends up in the Trinity. Another drainage system—the sanitary drainage system—carries the waste water from your home to the waste water treatment plant, where it is treated and then dumped into the Trinity River.