Sign Up for a River Clean-up!

Calling all Boaters!

    AW has a new goal for 2006: More clean-ups on whitewater rivers than ever before, with a special focus on rivers near and dear to AW’s river stewardship efforts.  To accomplish this goal we are partnering with the National River Cleanup Week® program to offer awesome incentives for participation.  We will be publishing the winner of the photo contest in our AW Journal, and will otherwise seek to grant participants fame.   For the first time, NRCW program will be tracking participation by paddlers, and AW is launching a new website dedicated to sharing news of whitewater river clean-ups.

    Visit the new AW Whitewater River Cleanup website, which is part of our River Stewardship Toolkit at: http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/Wiki/stewardship:stream_cleanups

    The site is fairly slim right now, but we hope to fill it to the brim by May 13th, when National River Cleanup Week® begins.  If you are planning a river cleanup during the official clean-up week, or any time during 2006, we want to know about it!  Simply sign up on the National River Cleanup Week® website www.nationalrivercleanup.com and note that you are a paddler, and drop kevin@amwhitewater.org an email with "River Cleanup" in the subject line letting us know when and where your river clean up will be.  

    Few actions by the paddling community so strongly and honestly convey our river stewardship ethic than participation in a river clean-up.  By focusing on whitewater rivers we can show neighbors and other recreationists that we care for the river, and are willing to take a day off to improve a river’s ecological health and scenery.  We would love to have paddlers sign up to clean the many rivers AW has worked on.

    At the bottom of this web article is a list of the rivers on our workplan right now, but there are many AW legacy rivers that are not on this list.   For more AW clean-up targets, check out a sneak preview of our upcoming Whitewater Release page, on which AW hydro successes are tagged with an AW logo: http://www.awa.org/content/Wiki/rivers:releases:start

   For more information, including the great incentives being offered by the program’s sponsors, please refer to the press release posted below.  Note that AW donor, Green River Coffee Roasters, is the presenting sponsor.  What a great company!

PRESS RELEASE:

Knoxville, TN – National River Cleanup Week® 2006 has kicked off its fifteenth annual national river stewardship event with its strongest-ever lineup of sponsors and partnerships.

Presenting Sponsor Green Mountain Coffee Roasters will undertake a company-wide river cleanup initiative May 13-21, 2006. They are joined by Perception, Thule, Wilderness Systems, and other corporate sponsors whose cash and in-kind support "will catalyze more cleanup participation," notes David Brown, Chairman. "We’ll be able to support organizers and their efforts at the highest level in recent history, thanks to this year’s corporate commitment."

Additional sponsors are America Outdoors, which will donate the operational backbone for National River Cleanup Week 2006; The Shimoda Group for sponsorship and promotional coordination; the Bureau of Land Management and USDA Forest Service.

This year the American Canoe Association (ACA), American Whitewater (AW), River Network and Northern Forest Canoe Trails have developed innovative efforts to reach out to the river/paddling communities. Specifically, ACA is offering paddling clubs and other affiliate organization discounts on liability insurance coverage for registered participants; AW is challenging its members to conduct cleanups on rivers that AW has protected or restored.

The winners of the Where Does the Trash Come From? student essay competition and National River Cleanup Week 2006 Photo and Publicity Contests for organizers will receive prizes provided by sponsors. Each organizer who signs up by March 31 will receive a Green Mountain Coffee Roasters mug and package of coffee. Those organizers are then eligible to win a Keurig Single Cup Brewer and a month’s supply of K-Cups from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

The National River Cleanup Week mission is to raise public awareness of the magnitude of trash accumulating in our nation’s waterways and to develop a constituency for clean waterways. Since 1992, over a half million National River Cleanup Week volunteers have collected trash from over 95,218 miles during 4,623 cleanups.

For more information on National River Cleanup Week 2006 or the Where Does the Trash Come From? competition visit www.nationalrivercleanup.com or contact info@nationalrivercleanup.com

Rivers Currently on the AW Workplan