Waste360 Staff, Staff

March 30, 2016

1 Min Read
San Jose Removes Decades of Trash and E-Waste from Dry Creek Beds

Following a four-year drought, San Jose volunteers have successfully removed decades of trash from dry creek beds. This trash buildup contained a wide variety of items, including e-waste items like computer monitors, floppy disks, cassette tape decks, typewriters and more. During the cleanup, volunteers were also able to remove 73 percent of trash from local hotspots.

This drought has been the driest four-year period the state has seen since 1850, and water releases from the state’s four reservoirs—Lexington, Calero, Guadalupe and Almaden—were cut by almost 50 percent by their owner, Santa Calra Valley Water District.

CBS San Francisco has the details:

There’s at least one silver lining to California’s four-year drought. In San Jose, volunteers have been able to clean out decades old garbage stuck at the bottom of dry creek beds.

“This past year, the creek levels were really low, because it was the fourth year of drought. And so, in some places there was no water in parts of the creek,” Emily Kurth of the city’s Environmental Services Department told KCBS

Kurth said that was a good thing for one reason: volunteers were able to clean out tons of old garbage that’s been waterlogged for decades.

Read the full story here.

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