Girl Scouts from Troop 20472 clean trash out of Toney’s Brook on Oct. 24.
GLEN RIDGE, NJ — Glen Ridge was one of the only inland locations to host a cleanup through Clean Ocean Action’s Beach Sweeps program, a statewide effort to minimize trash on New Jersey’s beaches and in the lakes, streams, rivers and bays. Volunteers turned out with rubber gloves and boots to wade into the creek that runs parallel to the Glen Ridge station’s train tracks.
“We do this twice a year — once in the spring and once in the fall,” said former Glen Ridge township clerk Michael Rohal, who has been volunteering with the cleanup event for two decades. “We take inventory of what litter we pick up, and they put it out in an annual report. There are some strange things you pick up.”
Girl Scout Troop 20472 from Ridgewood Avenue School was at the cleanup to clean around the gazebo and in the creek at Toney’s Brook. They found shirts, an abundance of coffee cups, face masks, and metal poles and pieces. Rohal suspects the metal is debris from the train tracks; whether it blows over the fence accidentally or rail workers throw it over intentionally isn’t known.
There are stranger things found across the state during Clean Ocean Action’s cleanup events. A section of the annual report is dedicated to a “Roster of the Ridiculous,” cataloging the most curious items pulled from the land to throw into trash bags. The 2020 roster included a back scrubber, a full prescription bottle, a computer monitor, a check for $81, a plastic skeleton skull, a surfboard, a barbecue grill, a lawn mower, a 10-foot sailboat, restaurant menus and a bedframe.
Plastic accounted for 72.49 percent of the debris cleared in cleanups, according to the report. Foam came in a distant second place, making up 6.73 percent of the trash picked up last year. Cloth, wood, paper, metal, rubber and glass each made up between 1 and 5 percent of the total. New to last year’s report was the pandemic-related category of “personal protective equipment”: 0.6 percent of trash picked up were rubber gloves and masks. A total of 1,113 pieces of PPE were collected in 2020 statewide.
The RAS Girl Scouts have cleaned up the brook before, though this was the first year they participated in an event instead of going on their own armed with trash grabbers and garbage bags.
“We’re not doing it for a badge; we’re just doing it to do it,” troop leader Stacey Porawski said in an interview with The Glen Ridge Paper at the event. “We’ve come down on our own to clean it up. They seem to really like cleaning up the glen.”
The spring 2020 Clean Ocean Action cleanup was canceled due to the pandemic, so it’s hard to tell if the total amount of trash actually decreased from the year before. Volunteers across the state numbered 3,746; they picked up 185,221 pieces of trash. When the 2021 report is released, there will be better data to compare.
But Rohal said he’s seen a decrease locally.
“They track the items picked up and the volume of it, and hopefully it’s decreasing every year,” he said. “It’s cleaner than when I started here, and I’ve been doing this 20 years.”
Photos by Amanda Valentovic
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