MILWAUKEE— Piece by piece, volunteers picked up plastic at 89 different locations in the greater Milwaukee area on Saturday.

“It's got to start in your own community,” said Dan Knopp, one of those volunteers.

What You Need To Know

  • About 3,000 people volunteered to pick up garbage at 89 different Milwaukee-area locations

  • Milwaukee Riverkeeper expects they will pick up 100,000 pounds of trash, most of that will be plastic

  • Microplastics get into our waterways and ultimately food and drink we consume
Dan Knopp picks up trash in Milwaukee.

Knopp is one of the 3,000 volunteers participating in the Milwaukee Riverkeeper Spring Cleanup. He is worried about plastic pollution.

“You're finding a lot of little bits microplastics, which made me think about that stuff breaking down pretty quickly and being ingested by fish,” Knopp said.

Milwaukee Riverkeeper says most of the roughly 100,000 pounds of trash picked up at the cleanup will be plastic. They know because this is the 26th time they have done this event.

“We clean it up and it just comes back,” said Jennifer Bolger Breceda is executive director of Milwaukee Riverkeeper.

She says all of that plastic doesn't biodegrade.

Most of the garbage picked up will be plastic.

“It breaks down into microplastics, and it causes issues, we know that there's plastic in the fish in the Milwaukee River, we know that it's in the umbilical cord in babies, we have a single use epidemic here,” Bolger Breceda said.

That's is why Milwaukee Riverkeeper has banded with other nonprofits, businesses and the city to form a coalition called Plastic Free MKE. Their goal is to cut down on single use plastic in the city.

“It provides ways for people to get involved, take a pledge, support a business that's gone plastic free, find alternatives, that single use plastic is really damaging our world,” Bolger Breceda said.

Last year this event was cancelled because of the pandemic, this year people were eager to clean up and Milwaukee Riverkeepers had to cap volunteer registration at 3,000.

“I think this year in particular people realized how much our natural spaces mean to us,” Bolger Breceda said.

Volunteers will pick up about 100,000 pounds of garbage in the city.

With the year off for the cleanup, Bolger Breceda said the trash is even worse this year — which volunteers have noticed.

“It seems like it's a lot worse this year since last year was cancelled with COVID, so it's pretty sad,” said Amanda Threurich, one of the volunteers.

Volunteers said it's sad to see this much garbage, but it makes them happy to know they were helping out.

“This river is beautiful just to be picking up garbage to help it stay that way feels pretty good,” said Brady Seehafer, one of the volunteers.