The numbers are in from the River Sweep event a couple of weekends ago: 45 volunteers spent 3 hours picking up 2,030 pounds of trash from 1 mile of the Ohio River shoreline in Covington.
“That’s about 45 pounds per person,” said Christin Badinghaus, a student from Northern Kentucky University who is working in the City’s Solid Waste & Recycling Division this summer. “We were able to collect more trash and recycling than last year with fewer volunteers.”
And how enthusiastic and determined were those volunteers?
• Two of them spent over an hour digging up a plastic wagon completely buried in the river mud.
• To reach a large blue bucket lodged out in the river, several others laid down logs to build a path and created a chain by holding hands.
• Other volunteers couldn’t wait for the event to kick off and scoured the parking lot of Covington Landing of trash.
• And Ian Hunt celebrated his 21st birthday by numbering 21 bags and filling them with help from his father, Richard, who owns Roebling Point Books & Coffee.
Among the trash collected were a metal shopping cart, a Radio Flyer wagon, an array of large buckets, six tires, a door, rugs, old clothing, destroyed tents, large chunks of Styrofoam, and part of a fence, etc.
Volunteers also filled nearly 10 bags with recyclable plastics and bottles.
During instructions, volunteers drank coffee from RoPoBoCo and ate donuts from The Village Nutz. Lunch was provided by Jimmy John’s on Madison Avenue.
The event was part of a larger, six-state cleanup along some 3,000 miles of shoreline of the Ohio River. In Covington, the event was hosted by the City and its partner, the non-profit Keep Covington Beautiful, with help from Rumpke Waste & Recycling.
“It’s an important event because a lot of that litter would go right into the river and float downstream,” Badinghaus said.
For more pictures, see the City of Covington’s Facebook page HERE.
Covington Recycling event totals 10 tons
Residents drop off old electronics, confidential documents
Some 160 vehicles dropped off almost 10 tons of material in a targeted recycling event held last Saturday in Covington.
The weight scales told the story of the success of the annual Recycling Drop-Off Day for Electronic Waste and Paper Shredding:
• 9,291 pounds of electronics (i.e. old computers, TVs, printers etc.), as measured by Cleanlites Recycling, a private vendor which disassembles and disposes of electronic waste.
• 10,000 pounds of paper (confidential documents that needed to be shredded), as measured by Shred-it, an authorized document destruction center.
“Ironically, this was a slight shift in what was brought in, since last year we had 11,791 pounds of electronics and 8,000 pounds of paper,” said Shannon Ratterman, with Keep Covington Beautiful (KCB) and The Center for Great Neighborhoods (CGN).
“Of course the key thing to remember is what it accomplished: We kept all the hazardous chemicals from those devices from eventually leaching into the earth, and we helped people clean out stashes of documents while protecting their privacy,” she said.
KCB and CGN co-hosted the event in partnership with the City of Covington. It was held in the parking lot of Holmes High School.
“I want to give a huge thanks to everybody who dropped off stuff,” Ratterman said. “Overall it was a great event that went very smoothly thanks to some great vendors and great volunteers.”
City of Covington
