When our crews are out attending to day-to-day lake management and stormwater services they expect to take care of issues that are biological in nature, such as weed and algae control, pest control and debris removal from leaves and branches, but we are always amazed at the amount of man made trash that ends up in our waterways! Despite increased environmental awareness in the last several decades, some people still use waterways as receptacles for unwanted items.
The most common litter in U.S. streams is household trash, including plastic cups, bottles, and beer and soda cans. Plastics can be especially hazardous to wildlife. Depending on their form they can either be ingested, causing internal organ failure, or they can cause a slow strangulation.
As the cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo said in his poster for the first Earth Day in 1971, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The mission of Aquascape Environmental is to provide superior ecological services that promote sound stewardship of our land and water resources. Our mission has motivated us to think green in our operations since long before it became trendy to do so. The very heart of our company is keeping the waters of our region beautiful and healthy for humans and wildlife. That’s why we go above and beyond our scope of services to not only clean up trash from lakes and ponds, but to bring it back to our offices to sort, separate and recycle. This way we are not only removing this material from our waterways but also eliminating this material from going to a landfill which provides a Win,Win for our environment!
The photo below is of a commercial sized recycling dumpster filled with discarded bottles and cans, picked up by our crews. We typically fill this dumpster every two weeks. That makes an annual average equivalent to 12 large dump trucks!
