TTF kicked off our countdown to Healthy Trails 5k Run/Walk coming up on April 27 by hosting a cleanup event at Friends Hospital last Saturday. We’re on a mission to work with our partners to make the park race day ready! Clean up partners included The Scattergood Foundation, Philadelphia Water Department, and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Roots to Reentry Program.
The Healthy Trails 5k Run/Walk will showcase Tacony Creek Park’s stream and trail improvements undertaken by Philadelphia’s Water and Parks & Recreation departments.
Volunteers from the community, Northwood Civic Association, Central High School, and our Board of Trustees picked up 38 tires and 20 bags of trash and recyclables from the creek and surrounding park! They also picked up and tallied 264 pieces of trash including clothing, plastic bottles, styrofoam products, cigarette butts, food wrappers, and cans. Out of all the trash tallied, there were 77 plastic bottles — that’s 11 per volunteer!
The three Central High School students who attended are well on their way to joining our first class of Watershed Heroes. To find out about the program and how you can also become a Watershed Hero too, contact Alix Howard at alix@ttfwatershed.org/215.844.8100.
TTF’s mission is to improve the health and vitality of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Creek and its watershed, both in the creek and in the neighborhood. We host clean up events to get trash out of our creeks while educating our volunteers – and telling them to pass on the message – about storm drains and where the pipes end.
Sixty percent of Philadelphia’s storm sewers are combined, where both sanitary waste from buildings and the trash from the streets go into the same pipe. When too much water overwhelms those pipes, everything passes through an overflow and empties directly into the creeks. To find out how you can prevent trash and other pollutants from getting into the storm drains in the first place, please see our website.
To see more photos from the event, visit our Flickr. To find out about future Tacony Creek Park programs, contact Alix Howard at alix@ttfwatershed.org/215.844.8100.
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