This April, add litter clean up to your walks, and help clean up our campus waterways!
To celebrate Earth Day, the University of Maryland Arboretum & Botanical Gardens, SustainableUMD, and NatureRx would like you to enjoy the natural areas of our urban campus while doing good for the environment.
Explore one of the creeks that flow through campus, and do your own litter clean up along the way. Help protect wildlife and cleaner water to flow into local rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. Invite friends to join you, but stay safely physically distanced and masked.
The area where litter collects are the creeks that run near the edges of campus: Campus Creek is a stream that starts inside the grounds of the University of Maryland Golf Course and continues behind Oakland Hall, the tennis courts, Eppley Recreation Center all the way to Paint Branch. Litter ends up in water ways because it flows downstream with rain water.
Help us clean up these areas by collecting trash! Unfortunately, all items that end up in our waterways, no matter what they are made of, are trash or compost, and cannot be recycled due to contamination. All trash items can go into any sort of plastic or paper bag and be deposited in our black dumpsters or trash receptacles around campus. Compost includes soiled paper and cardboard and no plastic bags should be tossed into compost bins. A map of dumpster locations can be found here!
Track where you walked, and how many bags of litter you collected. Afterwards share this on our form: https://forms.gle/yZhAdQnfX7vBnPJr5/ Gathering this information lets us know how litter is on our campus, tracks our efforts, and gets reported to our stormwater manager.
Take a picture of your efforts to encourage others to be aware and follow your lead! Post your pictures, and tag us on Facebook or Instagram @umdabg. By tagging us you’ll be entered into a raffle for a sustainable gift to be mailed to you!
To learn more about stormwater management on campus, visit: https://sustainingprogress.umd.edu/measuring-progress/sustainable-water-use