Student organizations convene for Stroubles Creek cleanup

We are the Society of Plastics Engineers, Student Chapter at Virginia Tech. And we have this bi-annual, once a semester event where we come out to Stroubles Creek and the Duck Pond watershed area and basically just pick up any trash that we find, plastics, metals, basically anything that's not supposed to be in the watershed, and we'll pick it up and collect it and take it out. The whole idea of this event is it's a joint event between the Society of Plastic Engineers and the EWRI. We're basically the environmental water resources students in the Department of Civil Engineering. So we're just going around pretty much everywhere is free game. They can go up the creek over here on either side. And then looping all around the duck pond and just picking up any kind of trash we can find, big or small. It's just, like, a great opportunity to just be out here on campus, you know, close to this stream. I really enjoy being here in the nature, being outside. And then you also have this aspect of knowing you're helping and giving back to the community, right. So, just collecting trash and removing whatever is not natural to this environment. Also, understanding it's always interesting for me because in our bubble of polymer scientists, everyone knows how important it is to properly dispose of plastics or even, like metals, whatever materials you're dealing with. I was really happy this year because we had such a great turnout. I mean, this is like three times the amount of people that we had participating from last year. I think it's undergrad students, it's grad students. It's people involved in manufacturing, like, polymer science people and environmental and civil engineering students. So, it's really cool to see just the breadth of interest in trying to address this problem right here on campus. Even just doing little things like this and trying to keep our water ways clean. I think is helping us from a human perspective because all this water is coming into our taps and drains, and we have to invest energy, and resources, and personnel to clean up our water for us. So, anything that we can do to make the water cleaner from the start is going to help us out in the long run as well.