Volunteers lead spring cleanup in river valley

EDMONTON - The 25th annual River Valley Clean Up was declared a success Sunday after hundreds of volunteers showed up to collect litter from Edmonton parks and ravines.
The largest group was probably downtown in Louise McKinney Park, where about 260 people picked up at least 200 bags of garbage, the city’s volunteer and special projects co-ordinator Kevin Moore said.
“Coming into the park, it looked pretty clean … but I said ‘just look at the stuff that gets stuck in the tree line,’ ” he said.
“It just starts to leap out at you.”
Roughly 250 volunteers organized by community leagues were on the other side of the North Saskatchewan River removing trash from the Mill Creek ravine.
Hundreds of other people were out at such locations as Heritage and Rundle parks in northeast Edmonton, Dawson Park and the Fulton ravine.
“It was quite successful,” Moore said.
Some groups have already started their work. There are 72 organizations involving 2,700 people so far registered to help with cleanup efforts sometime between April and June, Moore said.
In 2011, 3,000 people gathered more than 3,200 bags of junk during the summer, and Moore hopes those results will be exceeded this year.
“I see groups every week in the warm weather months … If they want to clean a park, who am I to say no?”
The River Valley Clean Up was the first of what are now many programs aimed at making Edmonton more attractive under the Capital City Clean Up umbrella, including Adopt a Block, the 15 to Clean Challenge and graffiti wipeouts.
The weekend also saw hundreds of people out fundraising for various non-profit groups by picking up litter beside highways across Alberta.
The amount of trash showing up in the river valley has dropped considerably over the years, although lots of paper, construction material and other garbage is still collected, Moore said.
But there are few of the old cars, tractors and other machinery that were once common, he said.
“A lot of the river valley was a garbage dump.”
The oddest item Moore heard about this weekend was a dead coyote near Rafter’s Landing.
He was happy to discover that Alberta’s recent election campaign didn’t add to this year’s litter burden.
“Not once today did I see an election sign, so hats off to the different political parties in the province.”