u/cvillelitter_pickers

Cville Litter Pickers is a community volunteer group that runs cleanups most Saturdays around Charlottesville and Albemarle. This weekend we took on the former Kmart lot at Hydraulic and Hillsdale, and it turned into our biggest haul of the year.

A few folks found us through this sub a couple weeks ago and turned up at our Main Street cleanup the Saturday before this one — 45 bags off that site. Thank you, genuinely.

This one was fifty bags. Plus a list of dumped items I'm still trying to make sense of:

- a stripped-down hotel-style AC unit

- the front panel off a convenience-store coffee machine

- a bag of windshield wipers blades

- three pallets

- two tires

- car parts, old signage, and construction debris including pressure-treated wood old enough that I didn't want to guess at its age

We worked the lot itself, the Route 29 roadside, the Hydraulic Road side out to Brandywine, part of Hillsdale Blvd, and the buffer behind Whole Foods. Behind Whole Foods it was almost entirely cans and bottles — heavy foot traffic, no dumping.

A lot of what we picked up wasn't really recognizable anymore. Coffee cups, drink lids, two-liters, plastic bags — far enough gone that they came apart as we picked them up. That's material that's been sitting through more than one season.

That lot is a few hundred yards from Meadow Creek and drains straight to it, so what doesn't get picked up eventually ends up in the water.

One thing we left alone: the alley behind the old Kmart is badly overgrown and we called it a safety issue. We'll go back in winter when the leaves are down.

Next one is this Saturday, Aug 22, 2–4 PM at Tonsler Park — meeting in the main lot at 500 Cherry Ave. That one's family-friendly, all ages, and all equipment is provided. Details and upcoming cleanups: cvillelitterpickers.org

Spent a couple hours on the walking trail that runs from the Wawa on 29 over to Hillsdale Drive. Hot, humid, buggy, and the crew that showed up worked straight through it. Twenty-five bags, plus a tire, a length of PVC pipe, some scrap lumber, a milk crate, and a shopping cart that made it a surprisingly long way from where it started.

The thing that gets me every time: from the trail itself it doesn't look that bad. Step four feet into the brush and it's a different story. That's most of what we pulled out — stuff nobody driving or walking by would ever see. All of it drains to Meadow Creek, so it was headed for the water eventually.

What spot should we hit next? A cross street or GPS coordinates help a lot — a decent number of our cleanups have come straight from somebody pointing one out.

We go out every Saturday, 2–4pm, somewhere in the city or county.

Next few:

• Aug 8 — Main Street and the edge of 10th and Page (old Charlottesville Tire lot, 843 Main)
• Aug 15 — Hydraulic and Hillsdale (old Kmart lot, 1801 Hydraulic)
• Aug 22 — Tonsler Park and the Fifeville Community Trail, which is a good one to bring kids to

We bring grabbers, bags, gloves, and vests. You just show up. cvillelitterpickers.org

Three cleanups around Charlottesville and Albemarle County over the last couple weeks. 95 bags total plus a bulk pile. Photos are in order.

Greenbrier Trail, July 25 — 25 bags. All of it out of about a hundred yards of trail. That's the one that still gets me. Nearly every bag was alcohol containers, and almost none of it was old — no fading, no dirt crust, no leaf litter grown over it. Two months of accumulation, maybe less, in a stretch you can walk in a minute.

Branchlands Blvd, Aug 1 — 45 bags. Commercial strip off Route 29 north. We staged in a closed big-box lot and worked the lot edges, fence lines, roadside, and the perimeter of a stormwater basin. Two hours. The before/after pair from the stairwell at the old Big Lots side yard is the one I keep looking at — same steps, ninety minutes apart.

Same pattern as Greenbrier, different setting: a bus stop with a trash can right at it, and the bushes twenty feet away full of bottles. Most of what we pulled all day was within easy walking distance of a receptacle.

Wawa cutoff trail, Aug 2 — 25 bags. Next afternoon, a short path connecting a gas station to a neighborhood street. Plus the bulk: a tire, PVC pipe, scrap lumber, a milk crate, and a shopping cart somebody had pushed a genuinely impressive distance into the woods. A junk removal outfit took the pile.

All three drain to creeks feeding the Rivanna, so it's headed for the river if it doesn't come out by hand.

Safety note for anyone working similar sites: we found a needle at two of the three. If you're doing commercial corridors or wooded edges, carry a sharps container. Cheap, fits in a pack, turns a stop-everything moment into a thirty-second one. Broken glass has been our most persistent problem — we're about to start bringing a wet-dry vac for it.

Who we are: the Cville Litter Pickers, a community volunteer group out of Charlottesville, Virginia. Cleanups most Saturdays somewhere in the city or the county. All ages, all equipment provided, two hours and everyone goes home. We scout sites ahead of time so we know what we're walking into, and we pull the recyclables out of the haul and run them to the recycling center separately.

Happy to answer anything about how we run it — route planning, disposal, getting the county to cough up a dumpster, whatever's useful.