SAN ANTONIO – Each weekend volunteers with River Aid San Antonio set out to clear the shores along rivers and creeks in and around Bexar County.
The nonprofit is now getting some help from the city, county and private companies to tackle the nasty litter problem.
Comanche Park and Martin Luther King Park now have floating booms installed along Salado Creek to catch bottles and Styrofoam floating down the creek.
Charley Blank, RASA Executive Director, said if the one-year pilot program to clear up the waterways works, there are plans to bring in more booms in the next few years.
“With this installation it will be Basura Bash everyday in Comanche Park, we will work to show this system is worth investment, our waterways are worth investment,” Blank said.
Bexar County, the City of San Antonio and the Coca-Cola Company have worked together to bring in the Osprey Initiative Litter Booms to Comanche and MLK parks.
The company will collect the trash and collect data about the type of trash that’s being collected.
Yael Girard with Osprey said the technology is being used in 20 different states and has proven to be cost-effective.
“If we can capture it earlier in it’s journey we’re able to consolidate our efforts and make it more efficient, we’re capturing that material before it spends too much time in the environment and starts to breakdown,” Girard said.
Bexar County Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert said there’s an interest in helping to expand this type of technology, and that would mean showing its effectiveness with data.
“Our waterways, they tell the story of our past, they are our present and our future. Without clean water you don’t have a community, without clean water you don’t have economic development,” Calvert said. Pointing out that controlling pollution in our waterways is also beneficial in preventing damaging floods in our communities.
KSAT 12 News reporter Patty Santos reached out to another organization that already has booms in place to see how they work.
Mary Beth Sutton, with the nonprofit Waterways, has helped install booms in Chattanooga Creek in Tennessee and St. Lucia. Sutton said it’s an expensive investment but it’s worth it.
“We have caught a stripped-down jet ski in the boom, which is crazy. But also it has been catching so much of the floating litter, so now it doesn’t go to the river and it doesn’t go to the ocean. So, it’s restricting the passage of that into our bigger water bodies,” Sutton said. “We were doing that typical from the shore or whatever, clean ups. But that doesn’t catch everything.”
Sutton said Osprey also provides data on what type of trash and where that trash might be coming from, so it helps them tackle the source as well.
The organizations behind the one-year program in Bexar County will reevaluate in a year if they can continue to support the program. Blank hopes to bring in more booms to other waterways in the next few years.
Osprey said they are working with organizations in Dallas, Houston and Laredo.