Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful will wrap up its “Tennessee River Grand Slam Cleanup” in Dayton, Tenn. as a final installment of the four-part cleanup campaign. The cleanup will take place on Sunday, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The four-week-long initiative is engaging hundreds of volunteers along more than 400 miles of the 652-mile Tennessee River.
The final cleanup serves a particularly significant purpose, as volunteers will clean the Tennessee River’s Chickamauga Lake two days prior to the Major League Fishing Bass Pro Tour. The high-profile professional fishing tournament will run April 9-14 and will be televised on the Discovery Channel later this year.
KTNRB has partnered with Living Lands & Waters for the Grand Slam Cleanup to take volunteers out on 30-foot-long steel plate boats to remove trash from the water and shorelines. KTNRB will provide volunteers with t-shirts, stainless steel water bottles, and a free meal from Dayton Boat Dock & Grill. Volunteers may register at www.KeepTNRiverBeautiful.org/register.
Due to their tournament schedule, MLF’s professional anglers are unable to join the April 7 clean-up. However, they have been so inspired by these conservation efforts, that they have pledged to come out and join the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) group cleanup site as they partake in the 30th annual Ijams River Rescue presented by TVA with the support of Lowe’s on Saturday, April 6. Ijams Nature Center’s community-wide cleanup brings together hundreds of volunteers across several counties to clean up the river and its creek tributaries.
The Tennessee River Grand Slam Cleanup events are offering timely relief to the Tennessee Valley, which was hit with severe flooding this February – the wettest February ever recorded in the region. Keep America Beautiful awarded a $10,000 Community Restoration and Resiliency Fund grant to KTNRB to offer cleanup relief following February’s floods.
Helen Lowman, president and CEO, Keep America Beautiful, helped to clean the river at the initial Grand Slam Cleanup events in Pickwick Lake, Miss. and The Shoals, Ala. in March. At the first two cleanups, 168 volunteers removed 9,000 pounds of trash. KTNRB’s third stop in the tour will be in Knoxville, Tenn., to support the Saturday, April 6, Ijams River Rescue, and the campaign will end in Dayton, on Sunday.
This Tennessee River Grand Slam Cleanup is part of a nationwide effort known as the Great American Cleanup, the signature program of the Keep America Beautiful, the nation’s largest community improvement nonprofit organization. The full release can be found here.
The cleanup will also catalog the types of litter gathered after a 2017 study by German professor Dr. Andreas Fath found that the Tennessee River was one of the most plastic-littered rivers in the world.
For more information on Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful and river cleanups, visit www.KeepTNRiverBeautiful.org.