Trash cleanup is heaps of fun!
Bodega Avenue is a popular roadway for cyclists and for joggers as it links a number of highly prized and beautiful routes in the area. We started noticing roadside trash when we brought our bins to the street each week, and started picking it up just in front of our property. Shockingly, we were gathering a full bag every two weeks!
Trash builds up and breaks down into smaller pieces that washes down into creeks, polluting the Petaluma River and out into the Bay. This junks up our beautiful waterways and creates hazardous conditions for wildlife.
One particularly curious find was an entire family sized meal from In & Out Burger. Talk about “animal style”, ugh. We found even larger piles of trash - several coming from old automobile accidents strewn with small and larger plastic debris. We called the county, who said the best way to handle this is to organize locally and they sent us their program information.
We jumped on board. We decided to partner with the Sonoma County Community Roadside Clean Up Program to help make this beautiful bit of countryside a little cleaner. We adopted a two mile stretch of Bodega stretching from Butcher Crown Roadhouse to Agius Market -this section has a few small tributaries of the Petaluma River crossing over it. The county has provided us with safety vests, bags and trash grabbers, along with roadside signage to let drivers know to look out for us. We will plan between 2-4 group cleanup events per year. The county agreed to come by and collect the filled trash bags after our events. This is a great way to get involved if you are interested in being part of the Deviled Eggery community.
On March 18, we held our first official group event. Several of us showed up one rainy morning. We suited up in our safety gear, and split into two groups, attempting to spread out and conquer debris along Bodega. One group went a short distance to right, encountering a big, ugly pile made up of the smashed smithereens of plastic dashboard parts, a leaky battery, tire, rims and two plastic bumpers. It was the remains of a traffic collision. This group spent nearly all their time extracting plastic bits from the Kizer Creek crossing on Bodega Avenue. They also ran into many skeletal remains of a larger animal. The other group went further than the first - collecting multiple, huge bags of trash including dozens of tiny booze bottles and beer cars (adding more cause for alarm for safety along Bodega Ave) and a mess of numerous tiny, plastic tree tags, scattered near the exit of a nursery.
By the end of the event, we covered only about 1/2 a mile of Bodega Avenue - there was just so much trash! And although we removed a lot of debris, we know there will be more soon in the future and a whole lot of roadway we could not get to. If you want to help improve the roadways, rivers and creeks, join us. Or, if you’re a treasure hunter, join us to see who finds the strangest thing on the side of the road. One man’s trash is another man’s….In & Out Burger?!?