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Friends of the Riverfront, led by executive director Kelsey Ripper, organizes multiple cleanups every month to keep the city’s riverfront clean, while also building and beautifying miles of trails along the rivers.
On a sunny spring day at the tip of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a group of volunteers board a little boat and take a quick ride out to a hard-to-reach spot on the shore of the Monongahela River. There, on days with heavy rain, waste from downtown washes through a big pipe like a geyser and accumulates on the rocky hill surrounding it.
Volunteers for Friends of the Riverfront, a local environmental nonprofit, use grabbers to pick up trash and place it in buckets. The waste clogging the shore includes sports balls, empty snack bags, needles, and a crumpled-up tarp.
“Anything that floats will find its way here,” says Ben Halliburton, the water program coordinator for Allegheny CleanWay and the boat’s captain.
The cleanup provides a snapshot of the year-round work Friends of the Riverfront does. Two to three times a week, the group conducts cleanups along about 90 miles of the Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers area. As executive director of the organization for the past six years, Kelsey Ripper has been leading the way.
Ripper, who was honored recently in Pittsburgh Magazine’s annual 40 Under 40 roundup of rising young stars in the region, oversees a “small but mighty” staff of 11 people at Friends of the Riverfront, which began in 1991. Since then, the organization has built the Three Rivers Heritage Trail — 35 miles of hiking and biking trails along the shores of the Allegheny River, the Ohio River, and the Monongahela River — and organized regular cleanups to get rid of the unsightly waste that builds up by the trails.
Ripper considers these three rivers to be the region’s greatest asset, and access to them in a clean, safe location is important for the community, she says.
“It’s really amazing to see photographs of where trails were going to be built, filled with mattresses and junk,” Ripper says. The trail has “become such a valued asset. … When you see space that is taken care of, well loved and used, people will want to care for it and use garbage cans and dispose of trash properly.”
Friends of the Riverfront teams, which are working on building an additional 35 miles of trails, build trails out of pavement rather than crushed limestone and include drainage systems. They plant trees, which act like sponges soaking up rainwater, in pretty green spaces surrounding the trails, and install pollinator gardens and picnic benches. The beauty draws people to the great outdoors to get some free exercise along the trails, Ripper says.
“If you have a place that’s safe and you feel like you can go run or bike, and it’s free, and it’s near your home, you’re going to use that amenity more,” she says. “Just being in nature and in water has specific mental benefits.”
5 Things You Can Do to Keep Waterways Clean
Kelsey Ripper offers these five tips for people who want to help keep their region’s waterways clean.
- Think not just locally, but also globally. A lot of trash that goes into rivers, even those rivers that are hundreds of miles away from a coast, ends up in an ocean. “It goes right into the river which, of course, goes into the next river and the next river and the ocean. The earlier that we can get the trash, the better,” Ripper says.
- Volunteer with an organization like Friends of the Riverfront to help clean up riverfronts, beaches, and lake shores, and talk to people there. “It’s really amazing what you can learn and how that really sticks with you. You can see the impact of your own work,” she says.
- Declutter your yard and be mindful of what you keep outside. Strong storms and rising creeks can easily whisk items from your yard into bodies of water.
- If you have a garden, avoid planting invasive species that could spread beyond your yard. Invasive plants, including wild ones like Japanese knotweed, can wreak havoc on ecosystems, including areas along riverfronts.
- Talk to elected officials about developing trail systems in your area and investing in the infrastructure that beautifies the environment. “It’s important for people to voice support for more trails and riverfront access,” Ripper says. “They really do listen to constituents and are able to provide significant support for these types of amenities in their communities.”
