By Chris Barber
Contributing Writer

An estimated 700 volunteers, many of them family groups, braved the morning chill to pick up trash along the Red Clay Creek on Saturday.

The annual Red Clay Valley Cleanup was started and has continued under the leadership of the Brandywine-Red Clay Alliance for more than 30 years. It began as an effort to collect old newspapers, but now gathers anything that litters the area around the stream.

Scout troops and a large number of students from Kennett High School, among others, pitched in, including the Walk in Knowledge, a service and leadership club under the leadership of Loretta Perna at Kennett High School.

Students at all public high schools in Pennsylvania are now required to accumulate volunteer points through their high school years as one of their requirements for graduation. The Red Clay Cleanup is a popular destination for that service.

When the volunteers arrived in the early morning, they are given their instructions for location, green trash bags and bright green vests.

Brandywine-Red Clay executive director Jim Jordan said he was pleased with the turnout and the trash haul this year. He added that he was especially hopeful for the outcome of assigning younger children to safe trails.

“We encourage young kids to utilize trails, and they will see the trash and are less likely to litter as they grow up,” he said.

When the clean up was all over, they had filled two 30-yard Dumpsters, equating to 70 cubic yards of trash.

The variety of objects found was somewhat different from last year – especially the tires.

Last year they counted 530 of them – some dumped en masse in singular places. This year there were only 78 tires.

Jordan said those tires will be recycled and shredded, and then used as coverage for landfills.

Some other objects that showed up were golf balls and beer cans, which Jordan said out-numbered soda cans 25-to-1.

Jordan also said the project could not have been possible without the help of the townships and 12 different trucking companies that contributed their service to the effort.

The 13-mile-long Red Clay Creek is very much the waterway of Kennett Square. It moves through the borough and nearby townships by way of two branches. It ends with a meeting at the White Clay Creek in northern Delaware.

The Red Clay Valley Cleanup has evolved over the years to include Anson B. Nixon Park, Walnut Street, East South Street near the baseball fields and the Ashland Nature Center in Hockessin.