Last week, Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful (KTMB) hosted its annual Truckee River Cleanup. More than 693 volunteers showed up at 20 sites along the Truckee River and within its watershed, cleaning up trash and debris from Verdi to Wadsworth.
Volunteers removed lots of weeds (thanks to a particularly wet 2022-23 winter), cleaned up illegal dump sites, stenciled in storm drains, and participated in other park beautification projects.
During the September 16 Truckee River Cleanup, volunteers removed 3.1 tons of trash including: three coolers, three bike frames, six shopping carts, twenty tires, and six Bird scooters from the river. Twenty-two tons of weeds and green waste was removed, 325 storm drains were stenciled, and 135 trees were planted.
A few of the cleanup sites were in Sparks, such as the Lockwood Trailhead Park, which provides hikers with a mix of high desert and riparian views right along the Truckee River. The 135 trees that KTMB planted were cottonwoods in Rosewood Park (near Veterans Parkway) to provide shade and shelter along the trails.
“It’s a flat marsh, so it’ll be good for the ecological system and people visiting,” says KTMB Communications Director Chris Ewing. The City of Reno and Truckee Meadows Parks Foundation has been instrumental in helping plant the fast-growing weather-temperate trees.
Making sure that litter, green waste, and possibly hazardous items are disposed of properly creates a more beautiful, safer, and healthier community. It also helps protects the region’s water quality by keeping the areas around the Truckee River and other tributaries clean and mitigating fire risk by maintaining defensible space.
“The Truckee River Cleanup provided our community a reason to come together and make our home a more beautiful place. The Keep Truckee Meadows Beautiful team is grateful to our funders and municipal partners who made this cleanup financially possible, and we want to extend our gratitude to the hundreds of volunteers who made the Truckee River Cleanup a huge success,” says Darcy Phillips, KTMB’s Executive Director.
“This community cleanup went far better than expected. We were able to get a whole bunch of weeds cleared from the wet winter we had which keeps debris going into the river. I’m excited about the volunteers who came out- we had almost 700- and our community partners who helped us with this event,” Ewing adds.
KTMB will have a couple of small community cleanups coming up in October and the Christmas Tree Recycling Program will be taking place at the Shadow Mountain Sports Complex in Sparks. It’s a suggested $5 donation to drop off your trees, which the City of Sparks uses to chip up the discarded pines and use them for mulch and weed abatement within the city’s parks.
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