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A Kayaker's Cuyahoga Cleanup · Clean Water Works

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Nice to have something to do during the winter.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you probably are not out on the river Not nearly as much anyways, and, like the last two weeks, it's been frozen.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: You know most of the spots that I go to, so take a little break.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Cool, come back in a couple of weeks when it's 34 degrees and we can kayak again.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: But I have like full dry suit.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: You know I can jump in the water and even at negative temperatures.
• 0:27
  Speaker 3: Okay, well, this is Clean Water Works a podcast about clean water and related topics.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: And you're Mike Uva and I'm Donna Friedman.
• 0:35
  Speaker 3: We are very fortunate today to have Eddie Olshansky here with us in the sewer district studios.
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: Eddie goes by the name Trashfish.
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: Welcome, Eddie.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Hey, how's it going, and thank you both for having me.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: So I first learned of you, I think, through your Instagram feed.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, probably that's where most people know us from.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: Okay, are you a Clevelander?
• 0:58
  Speaker 3: Are you from Cleveland?
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like from the suburbs.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: You know, I grew up in the Bedford area and I've moved away a bunch of times, but, as a lot of us Clevelanders do, you always end up back here, at least once or twice.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, how does that happen though?
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: It's awesome, cleveland rules.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: I know People move away for a bit to Chicago or New York and then decide that things are better here on the North Coast.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: You don't meet too many better people than us Clevelanders.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: You know, I'm being a little.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: That's a very nice rosy vibe in this very cold, frigid day, so I'll take it.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll take all the warmth we can get, we all got to huddle together in this.
• 1:34
  Speaker 3: Is this a polar vortex?
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: We're in right now?
• 1:36
  Speaker 3: I think so.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: I don't know, but it is funny to think about.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Like you walk down the street and there's still people smiling.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: You know, there's still people out in the cold.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: We know how to be in the cold.
• 1:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you just got to bundle up, right.
• 1:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, dress right.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: All the layers, not bad weather, just bad gear.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: Exactly your organization.
• 1:52
  Speaker 3: You go out on the river, primarily the Cuyahoga, or do you go out on other streams as well?
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we kind of go all over the place, but our main focus is right down here in the shipping channel, like in the flats.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: So the last six or so miles of the river gets most of our attention.
• 2:06
  Speaker 3: Okay, and you are paddling on kayaks and collecting trash from the river.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and we've got a whole fleet of kayaks that are available for free for volunteers.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Any day of the week you contact us and say hey, tuesday morning three of my friends want to come out before work.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Or Saturday afternoon I'm bringing the whole family, bring all 12 boats and we've got all the gear for you Life jackets, paddles, grabbers, bags and then you get a very cute tour guide.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: If I do say so myself, I go out with pretty much every group that goes out, and both as like a safety person, you know, and then also there's a lot of questions.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: You know like people come.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: I tell people all the time it's a ruse.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: I trick you with the free kayak and the nice experience, and then you come down and get a two-hour mini science lesson from me about all the problems that are facing our river.
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: Oh, people don't expect that.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: I think, and not only do some people not expect it, some people don't appreciate it.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: They're like, hey, man, quiet down, I'm out here trying to pick up garbage and I'm like, yeah, but think about where it came from, think about where it's going.
• 3:10
  Speaker 3: They just don't want the lecture right.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this guy should stop lecturing me.
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: Okay, so did you start out as a trash picker-upper or a kayaker, which came first.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: I guess I always was like kind of the person who was just going to pick up some like random garbage on the ground, if it, you know, strikes me.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: But I'm an avid fisherman and I broke my ankle and I was fishing from crutches and a wheelchair for two seasons and I was like this is no fun.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: So I bought a kayak.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: I'd never even been in a kayak, I just got one on Craigslist and I remember like the first time I got into a kayak someone was helping me jam my, cast my walking boot like into the kayak.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: So I still had a broken leg and so I was like, oh, and then immediately you're out there fishing, and if I couldn't catch fish that day, there's like almost no area around here where you can't come back with a net filled with garbage if you're not catching fish.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: So quite often I'd be struggling to catch fish but still want to be out there fishing and the easiest thing to occupy your time is clean up a little garbage around the river.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: And I was living out in Pittsburgh actually when I really first started kayaking, and their rivers are industrialized in the same way ours are there, you know, there's an absurd amount of trash flowing through Pittsburgh too, and so I had some friends over there that would like to come with me or borrow my kayaks and stuff.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: I had one spare kayak at the time and if I was trying to get them into you know, kayaking, they'd often see me picking up trash and they're like, well, oh, this is kind of cool.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: I didn't know you like this was part of your kayaking thing, and some smarter people than me were like you're making a difference here.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: There's no doubt about it.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: But if you really want to make like a change, you got to tell people about this.
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: You can't do it in secret.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: That was kind of a struggle for me.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: I'm not a big social media person and stuff like posting a picture of like me picking up garbage was so far outside of my comfort zone six years ago.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: If I really cared about this, if I wanted to make an impact, I had to start sharing it, and the internet was the easiest way to do that.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: So jump on Instagram and start making some trashy jokes and, you know, showing people the trash in the river, and it grew and has grown way bigger than I ever expected it to.
• 5:20
  Speaker 3: So you've been doing it for how many years now?
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: We just finished our fourth season with a public-facing volunteer group, but before that I was doing it for about two or three years just by myself.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: But yeah, over COVID, like we got much more popular and people had free time and you know I was testing the idea out in 2019.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: And then 2020 hit and it was like everyone's got the time.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: You need to just make this like truly public facing.
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: So you had a fleet of kayaks that you could lend out and bring people out on the river, which sounded insane until now.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: I need more kayaks.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: You know like I can't keep up with the amount of Clevelanders that want to come out and people from all over the country.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: We're going to stop in Cleveland to do trash fish.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: Is there anything else in Cleveland to do?
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: I'm like, wait a minute, you're coming, you're making a stop in Cleveland just to come clean up garbage with us.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Like that is awesome, you know, yeah.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Where do you store all these kayaks?
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Unfortunately, they're back at my house.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: This year we did have storage, like right on the river, Right by the water yeah, which made our made my life so much easier.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Like I said, I go out with every group, so it does.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: It takes a lot of time and effort.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Can you talk a little bit more about safety?
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: I know I've been out on my paddleboard on the river, I've been out for work out on the river and there are times when those ships come through and you got to get out of the way.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: Absolutely and like.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: That's one of the big reasons why I go out with every group and it's not just oh, you're renting our kayaks and you can go do whatever you want.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: I demand it's not state law, but I demand that everyone who is borrowing our kayaks stays in their life, jacket and stuff, especially when we're down in the shipping channel.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: It's a very deep section of the river and what people don't often understand is it looks very calm on top and the first couple of feet are, but like if you get down down into the current, that is a large, massive, moving body of water.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: So like the Cuyahoga river is such an amazing recreational resource for us, let alone a natural resource, and it's so underutilized and I think a lot of that is not having the confidence to go down there, cause it is, you know, it's 30 some feet deep and having someone out there who's comfortable, you know, can wet rescue We've, knock on wood, we've, out of over 1500 volunteers, we've never had anyone fall out of our kayaks, so yeah, 1500 volunteers and knowing how to act when the boats are around, where to go, because a lot of that is determined by exactly where you are on the river.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Sometimes being on the east side of the river is the safest.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: Sometimes being on the way it just depends on where that boat is and where you are.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: Our program has kind of got a three-pronged or four-pronged approach to like how we want to change the river and one of those things is getting more Clevelanders comfortable and knowledgeable about the safety.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: And the boats are a big one.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: But to be honest with you, the bigger the boat, the better the captain typically, and the less danger you're in.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: It's the sport boats, the people that are out there that have rented the boat, or maybe they have it out once or twice a year.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: That I stress to my volunteers Like that's, we all have our head on a swivel, we're all working together.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: If you see a boat coming from this direction, you're telling the next person down the line and we all try to keep each other safe.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: And then when it comes to the actual trash, everyone gets a grabber, like a three-foot long grabber, no matter how friendly that bottle or whatever is floating in the river looks to touch A y'all know a lot of that trash spent a good portion of its life in the sewer system.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: So with all the other things in the sewers that we don't really want to touch.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: So keeping our hands away from that is the best we just you know, everyone's just trying to do this as safe as possible.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: How much trash are you pulling out of the river?
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Right now.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: I used to be absolutely obsessive about weighing every bag and writing it down and this and that, and then I realized that that was driving me insane and wasting a lot of my time.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: My estimates put us, very conservatively, at about 100,000 pounds of trash that we've pulled out and again, that's not just out of the Cuyahoga River.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: We do travel quite a bit, so it's everything that gets washed up onto the banks and then, as the water recedes, that's typically where we go and, like most of the banks of the river are corrugated steel or cement.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: They're very smooth.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: That's expedites the flow of trash to the lake where basically no one could ever, you know, retrieve it.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: And so, having a little bit of trees and rocks and some quote unquote natural riverbank down there is where we target, like I know all throughout that river, where we're going to be able to pick up trash and where it's not worth going to because it's already flowed down, you know.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: So a lot of this trash does come from the sewers, a lot of it comes from street runoff and stuff.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: So after a big storm we could go out there and you don't even have to move your boat.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you could just park right in the middle of the river and the trash is flowing to you.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: You know we've seen fields of trash that are, you know they're bigger than football fields, and just because one, you know one thing let loose.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: Or there was a pylon up by a bridge that had been collecting for years, and then it rains and all that stuff gets flushed out.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: So some days you don't have to try very hard to fill up three, four, five full trash bags for each kayak.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: If you want to come out here and do the most good for the river and quit your job like I did, and buy 12 kayaks and spend five days a week out here doing it, that's all great.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: But you could probably go back to your grocery list at home and just think about the products that you buy and over the course of the year you've stopped more plastic from entering the river or any river or the environment in general than you would going out there five days a week.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: So in addition to actually going out on the river with your team, you're also trying to raise awareness about overuse of plastics, single-use plastics.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, Absolutely.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: And I mean, you know we talk about chemicals in plastics.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: We talk about harm to animals.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: We talk about harm to the communities where this plastic is being made, or this plastic is being incinerated for waste after you've used it.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: This plastic is being made or this plastic is being incinerated for waste after you've used it.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: You know, there's so much more to the plastics crisis than seeing it in the river or seeing the picture of a turtle with a straw up its nose, Like those are all very.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: You know that's sad and it's detrimental to our planet, but it goes so much far beyond that, and so to me, that's the most important.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: And you know, we brought up single-use plastics.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: I don't know this is not going to be good for your podcast listeners, so we'll give them a little audio, but here's a jar that I've brought for you guys and it's filled with something and here's what it sounds like, and if you could just describe it for our listeners maybe.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: So Eddie just handed me a jar full of tiny I assume plastic beads, Pellets, Pellets.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and they're about the size of a lentil, maybe slightly smaller, and you'd say I counted before or I weighed them before I came here.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: That's from one day he's picking up out of the river.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: They're called nurdles.
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: Nurdles.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Nurdles they are, or resin pellets.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: If you're in the industry, buying them and making something out of plastic, they're called resin pellets.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: If you clean them up out of your rivers, they're called nurdles.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Anything you can see around you made of plastic the rims of our glasses, the saran wrap, like everything made of plastic around us, starts its life as those beads.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: These are the small pieces of plastic that plastic starts its life.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: As you take those, you'd melt down, say, 150 of those to make a plastic water bottle.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: Okay, so everything that we use is, you know, made of plastic, starts its life as these little beads.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: Nerdles are zero-use plastics.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: They've never been turned into a product.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: You know, we said they-.
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: How do they end up in the river if they've never been used?
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: There's no regulations that relegate how those are treated in shipping or manufacturing.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: They're not seen as hazardous.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: You don't even have to have a lid on the box that those are shipped across the ocean on legally.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: You can have an open container with three trillion of those plastic beads and every time the wind blows, every bump that train hits or every stoplight the truck that's transporting it stops at too fast, they're falling out, they're ending up on the street and then ending up in our sewers and into our rivers.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: When you do hear about nurdles in the news, it's some one trillion were lost at sea because one shipping container fell off of a boat.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Or we just had a couple of years ago we had like 780 million in one container fall off of a ship in the Mississippi River and like that makes big news.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: But the EU estimates that they lose 23 billion nurdles a day in manufacturing where.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Let's take my kayak.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: If you wanted to make my kayak you'd use, by weight, about 1.2 million of those tiny plastic beads.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: But if you were a less scrupulous company it would be cheaper for you to just allow those to be swept into your drains than it is to hire someone to clean that.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: They're useless after they hit the ground they're contaminated.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: They can't be trusted to make good quality virgin plastic, so they become a waste product.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: And those were found in one day that's one day's collection out of the Cuyahoga River.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: They're just floating on the surface.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: They are Pretty much everything that trash fish picks up is floating on the surface and those nurdles.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: We take these little nets that are like five-inch aquarium nets.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: I just scoop that whole section up with these nets, take it home, I dry that out on a set of screens that I have a bunch of screens that I lay out.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: I dry that material and then we're able to run it through a series of sifters that get out all the organic material, all the sticks and twigs and even bigger pieces of plastic that we didn't take out, and then by the end of it you're left with basically as clean as you see them here by sheer number.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: These are hands down the biggest pollutant we have in the Cuyahoga River.
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: You're trying to raise awareness of the fact that the biggest problem isn't necessarily plastic bottles and trash being left and washing into the river, and that recycling is not, like the way to solve this problem.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: You know I mean that You're anti-recycling.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Um, I'm anti-plastic recycling, believe it or not.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Like, I'm fully on board for glass recycling, uh, metal recycling, like anything like that that it's.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: It's a proven system that works and can be profitable for someone.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: That's typically what it comes down to, like plastic recycling, virgin plastic.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Those pellets are so cheap because they are essentially the waste product of the fossil fuel industry.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: You know they use the chemical.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: The same chemicals that make up that plastic are the same chemicals in an oil spill and they're the same chemicals that they're not allowed to dump back into the ocean once they've distilled petroleum or you've got your fracking solutions or whatever, that used to be common, where you dump that waste back into the environment.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: Now it's just one step removed from that.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: They sell us a product made of that waste that then essentially just ends up back in the ocean.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: China put out a national decree I think it's called National Sword and that was saying we're basically no longer taking America.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: There's no buyers.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: And what was the buyer for?
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: It wasn't like these plastic bottles were going to China being cleaned, melted down and turned back into plastic bottles.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: They were being burned for fuel.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: It's waste to energy recycling and that is.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: It's no good.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: But I mean, you know now it goes under many different names advanced recycling, chemical recycling, pyrolysis.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: This stuff is not safe.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: Like burning plastic is.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: No matter what you call it, it's like the worst thing you can do to it, and that is what has driven the plastics recycling industry since its inception.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: So we all think, or a lot of people think, oh, this plastic bottle is going to get turned into a new plastic bottle and maybe I'll buy that one again and I'll drink.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: That's just not you know it's being burned because virgin plastic is so cheap, because it's a waste product.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: They basically give away these pellets.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: It's insane how cheap they are.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: If we took away that veil of, oh, I can use and use and buy and buy because I recycle.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: If you realize that what you're doing with that recycling is not what you think is being done with that recycling, maybe you'd stop buying so much of it.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: So I think it's probably worse for the environment for us to be recycling plastic than it is for us to-.
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: Or pretending to recycle plastic.
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, but no, plastic is good, plastic is your you know, and and to be quite honest though I I'm a realistic person I understand that, like, the fuel efficiency and safety of our cars would be much worse if there was no plastic, we wouldn't have like contact lenses, you wouldn't be able to have safe windshields for helicopters to transport heart transplant, okay.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: So like there are great reasons to use plastic, single use is not the one.
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: We do talk about emerging contaminants, a lot in wastewater and I think plastic specifically we don't have too many conversations about but we do talk about like PFAS and forever chemicals, things like that and combating that.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: I know on some of our outfalls you said you mentioned like after storm events you know you get, you sometimes see that flush of contamination, plastics or what have you coming through the river and I think you know we do have combined sewer overflow areas that you're probably familiar with.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking like most obvious on the Cuyahoga for you probably is the CSO 80 over by Scranton.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Road.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: It's like a big brick, huge tunnel, just to see where our consent decree program lines up with.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: You know, some of these outfalls directly to the Cuyahoga River, which is basically your workplace and ours.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: Sometimes Combined sewer overflow 80 is being controlled currently by the Westerly Tunnel.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: So that tunnel came online in the second half of 2024, July.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: So it was previously going off 60 to 70 times per year, which is a lot, and now it's down to one event per year which is great.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: So hopefully you're seeing some of these things, some of the work we're doing.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: Absolutely and, like I, follow the Project Clean Lake and everything I wouldn't be doing this podcast with you guys if I wasn't a fan of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District I don't know if I mentioned that but like big fan of y'all's and I mean you guys, the amount of sewer district employees that come up to me and they're like, hey, I know what you're doing, I know what you're going through, like thank you.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: And I have to say the exact same thing to them, cause I know that you guys are way you're keeping more trash out of the river right now than trash fish ever will.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: So like big props to the sewer department.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, when you say Northeast Ohio sewer district, around town, like at a party, people know our sewer district.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Like you know, and like we've got you guys have good social media engagement.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Like there's clearly like the brain power is strong here, like you guys are doing good stuff and there's not a whole lot of sewer departments that have the fan base that y'all do.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: You know we're all proud of that river.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think, at the district, when we think about combined sewer overflow, we think about, like human waste going out into the environment, and that's what we're really concerned about.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: Maybe first and foremost is that e coli entering um the cog river or whatever river body and then eventually going out to the lake um.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: But I think plastics, um, and debris are a big issue and so, if you don't mind me asking um, because, like I, like I said, have followed Project Clean Lake and I get questions about it quite a bit, so I've had to do some research how much of the street trash will be diverted, if that makes any sense.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: No, that totally makes sense.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: So there are combined sewer overflows, so those outlets to those bodies of water and a lot of those will be controlled by our tunnel system that you probably get questions on all the time.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: So we have seven main tunnels.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Six of them are constructed or in construction.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: We have one more, Big Creek Tunnel, which will be under construction in the next couple years.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: The Westerly Tunnel controls a lot of the outfalls that are on the west side of the Cuyahoga River.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: The majority in the part of the channel that you're in will be controlled at least in part, and those combined sewers that would normally go out directly are now going to go to the tunnel.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: So they go through the tunnel, but they go through quite the process.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: So there are debris racks that catch a lot of that debris.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: So then after that the tunnels get pumped out.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: So the Westerly Tunnel just, for example, would get pumped out and it would get pumped to our wastewater treatment plant.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: So I'm hoping, thinking that the nurdles that you were talking about, because they're so small, they would be considered like floatable.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: So we have a process that has skimmers, so whatever's floating to the surface would get skimmed off and taken and disposed of.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: That's awesome.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: So hopefully the majority of some of that direct waste would get captured in our tunnel.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: I guess it would depend on whether the street basin or the catch basin is going into the combined system or if it's just a storm sewer which passes directly to the environment.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so most of Cleveland not all, but most of Cleveland is combined sewers.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: So that means that everything's going to the wastewater treatment plant, which is why you have this huge combined sewer overflow issue, because the systems weren't built.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: Our wastewater treatment plants weren't built to take on all of that water, but that's what the tunnels are for.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: But you know you have all those communities upstream.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: Um, once you get past the cleveland boundary, we have a couple inner ring suburbs that have combined sewers, but for the most part, you know, those other 60 communities would have separate sewers.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: So if people are throwing garbage or if it blows out the window or if whatever it spills over, it would go to the rivers and creeks in the area.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: So I might not be out of a job quite yet.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: You're certainly not out of a job, but I appreciate you guys trying.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: I wish we could put you out of a job but you're definitely not, and we do work with, like the Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: I'm sure you're familiar with them too and probably have tabled with them a lot at different events.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: But they are also big on the education and trying to keep people to recognize that their catch basins probably go out to a creek near them if they don't live in the city.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: So I was just in Florida and I was looking at an educational sign at one of.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: I was at Biscayne National Park and it had refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, yep and I had never seen that.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: I don't know how that's possible, because it seems really catchy and it seems like it's probably everywhere and I just haven't noticed it.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: But that first one of refuse is just like.
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: You mean refuse to Just refuse Even buy it, refuse to buy it, don't accept it?
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Refuse to buy it, don't accept it.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that kind of mentality.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Just take the traditional three R's right.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Reduce, reuse, recycle.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: Recycle is third on the list because it is the third best option.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: The other two are much better and unfortunately, in some ways, reuse isn't a very good option because of how cheaply some of this plastic is made.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Those chemicals are leaching at rates that we have not seen with like heavy duty industrial plastics of yesteryear.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: When you tell someone, oh, I'm anti-consumption, like it's almost saying you're un-American.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: Like there's just so much about our culture that is throw it away, buy it new, buy it better, even though your old one works.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: Supporting the economy.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and an economy built on infinite growth is not supported by a world with finite resources and finite room.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: And that's where the real power of Trashfish comes like.
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: Getting all these hundreds of people to experience this down in the river and take that home and talk to somebody else about it, yeah, so when the weather gets a little warmer and you're ready for your for more volunteers, what's the best way for people to learn more about your organization?
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: If you're an Instagram person that's like where a lot of our stuff goes on, you can follow me at trashfish, underscore CLE.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: Like Cleveland, you could also go to trashfishcleorg, our website.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: There's a little thing that's like oh, volunteer with us or contact us, like donate if you'd like, but, like all that is on the website, you can send us an email.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, try to get your name on the list, because we fill up quick and it really stinks, but not everybody that tries to get out with us gets to go out.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: So, get in there early and, like, we'll try to get you scheduled up.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: We'd love to have you all out.
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: If you bring the whole crew from the office, we'd love to have you guys out.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: So I got two schools next week I get to go to Baldwin Wallace, talk to some college kids, and then at Walsh Jesuit in Cuyahoga Falls next week.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, speaking engagements all the time.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: That's what my winter, a lot of my winter, consists of.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: I'm in and out of schools, mostly all winter long.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Is the Cuyahoga River your favorite water body?
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: It sure is.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, I grew up I could basically throw a baseball from my house to the national park and hit the Cuyahoga River on the banks, and still like.
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: I live very close to the Rocky river now and I still drive all the way to the Cuyahoga river to fish and to hike and to ride my bike because it is the water that you know it gave me so much growing up.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Like I know I, my connection to the natural world is based solely on that river.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so just a little bit of a progress update on our project clean lake.
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: So there are 74 projects currently that are completed or active and all of this does impact the amount of combined sewer overflow that goes out to our rivers and out to Lake Erie.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: Eventually, from the start of Project Clean Lake, we are down to about 2.5 billion gallons of overflow from 4.5 billion gallons, and our goal is for 98% wet weather capture by 2036.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: So that's going to be around 494 million gallons of mine sewer Leftover.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so next to come online, or commenced at least in 2024,.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: We started the design of Big Creek storage tunnel, we completed the mining of the shoreline storage tunnel and we started construction of Southerly.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: So we're moving right along in our project.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: More power to you guys.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: Those are numbers I like to hear.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: I'm keeping you all in my thoughts.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: I promise you.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: I wish you guys the best.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: I know that you know sewer work is dirty work and like I'm super hyped that the community that you guys have here at the sewer department is so rad.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: I mean it's crazy.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: I'm a fan boy of the sewer department.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: I love you guys, so I don't get much help from anyone around the city.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, we've got there's people who go beyond not helping us push back.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we've had some gnarly pushback, actually a couple of times, um, trying to tell us we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing and where and what and whatever else.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: And then, you know, every once in a while a corporation around here does something that like is not very good and I, well, I've been a little bit shyer about it this year because I mean, I had I had death threat, like death threats over talking about someone polluting the river, you know, and like it's a little bit scary out there to be.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know to call myself an environmental activist or like something, but like it's, they're they're not super popular opinions, you know, and like cleaning up trash is the low-hanging fruit, like a lot of people get behind that.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: There's just so much more to the story and not a lot of people want to like pick at that scab.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: Right, you know so.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: But so I appreciate y'all having me on.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: I always love being able to share some of my weird obsessions with other people.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: So thank you so much, sure, and I hope you guys come out on the river.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: I'd love to paddle with you.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: You guys already got most of the speech, so I'll keep it down.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: When we're out there, you can just actually have some fun.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: Heard it.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we know this one Nerdles shush.
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah, thanks so much for coming out.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: It was great meeting you and we will follow you online.
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: Eddie Olshansky goes by the name Trashfish.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: Thank you very much, Eddie, for joining us and talking about your work on the Cuyahoga and other local waterways cleaning up.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Thank you all.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: Hope to see all y'all out on the water.