On April 2, three University of Pittsburgh organizations came together to help cleanup the "Jail Trail" or the Eliza Furnace Trail, a leg of the Great Allegheny Passage that connects Pittsburgh to Washington, DC. This cleanup was organized through the Campus Crew program by wonderful student leaders from Free The Planet club.

We found some pretty interesting and strange pieces of trash including a garden hose, metal pieces of a railroad track, pieces of fiber glass insulation, and the weirdest item of trash was a full bottle of moonshine, found by Justin. In total, we collected 304 pounds of trash! Check out the photos and videos on our Facebook page.

For America Recycles Day (ARD), the team from United By Blue will be headed out to Cobbs Creek Park for a cleanup of the creek. Since 1997, communities across the country have come together on November 15 to celebrate America Recycles Day.

Organized by our friends over at Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful(part of Keep America Beautiful), ARD is more than a celebration, it is the only nationally recognized day dedicated to the promotion of recycling programs in the United States.

United By Blue recognizes the importance of recycling in all of our cleanup efforts and, as always, we will be sorting and tracking the number and types of recyclables we remove throughout the day. In only 1 hour, 5 UBB staffers removed 735 pounds of trash!

On Tuesday, October 12th United By Blue did our first cleanup on the West Coast!  Located just outside of Los Angeles, about 100 volunteers came out to help remove 518lbs of debris from Seal Beach.

Seal Beach is fairly residential, but the gorgeous beaches and weather brings in over 2 million visitors every year.  Although this helps the local economy, it can usually have a negative effect on our oceans because: more people=more trash.  Much of the trash will be properly disposed of, but the piece that miss the can or simply blow away can end up in the Pacific, making its way out to the Gyre.  This cleanup helped assure that 518 pounds of that trash did not make its way to Midway Island or anywhere else near the Gyre.

Each day there is a different group or organization within UPenn that is sponsoring the daily cleanup; Civic House, 2011 Class Board, and Penn Outdoors sponsored this cleanup. We had an awesome group out at Pleasant Hill Park for the cleanup! This park had lots of little bits of trash - like cigarettes, plastic bottles, and lots of plastic bags. Some of the weird things we found was an empty handle of Grey Goose and a convertible top of a car. We found a lot of recyclable materials at this park: 90 aluminum cans; 101 glass bottles; and 291 plastic bottles! And congrats to Jon Chia for making the closest guess to the weight of the trash collected. He guessed 300lbs which is only 61lbs off of the true weight of the trash which was 239lbs!