Milwaukee Riverkeeper celebrated three decades of local cleanup efforts on April 26 with its 30th annual Spring Cleanup. The cleanup took place at over 100 locations in the greater Milwaukee area, where volunteers gave their time to tend to the local waterways.
Those who participated were given white t-shirts with a design on the front that read “Protect what you love,” representing Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s motif for the 2025 cleanup.
“This year’s theme, ‘Protect What You Love,’ is a nod to the heart of this movement — people caring for their rivers, parks and neighborhoods out of deep love for the place they call home,” Milwaukee Riverkeeper said in a press release. “Whether you’ve been part of the cleanup for years or are joining for the first time, you’re part of a legacy that started with neighbors looking out for their community—and their future.”
The Spring Cleanup first began at Hoyt Park in Wauwatosa in 1995, and 30 years later, it was one of four locations that had over 100 registered volunteers.
Participants were given trash bags and gloves, but several arrived with their own backpacks filled with cleanup supplies: sunscreen, bug spray and reusable water bottles.
Claire Flickinger, a recent addition to the Milwaukee community after a move from Minneapolis, attended her first cleanup last year with her husband. Prior to attending their second event, she shared their desire for it to become an annual outing.
“This is important to us and it’s important to the community,” Flickinger said.
The crowd of volunteers at Hoyt Park ranged from young to old, with several families working as a team to clean up the waterways. When the search began, some young children would share their excitement in finding spots with the most trash to clean up.
“The thing that I love about Milwaukee is the fact that we do have incredible collective action among the community members. When we want to do something, we do it. We do it our own way. We’re kind of a DIY community, the Brew City,” Jennifer Bolger Breceda, Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s Executive Director, said. “I think we are able to do that because of the size and because of the commitment and the heartiness of the people who live here.”
With an expected total of over 4,000 volunteers, including over 3,800 that pre-registered, the goal for the cleanup was to remove over 100,000 pounds of trash from local waterways in just a few hours of work.
“The fact that people want to make it happen is just really cool,” Bolger Breceda said. “We love the fact that we have a lot of people who care, and we have the people power and the volunteer enthusiasm, but the amount of trash is really concerning. That is increasing. [A] lot of it is single-use plastic. We want to turn the spigot off on the amount of waste that we create as human beings.”
At the conclusion of the event, volunteers were invited to congregate for a celebration at the Harley-Davidson Museum, recognizing the collective impact of one of the largest Earth Month volunteer events in the state of Wisconsin.
With the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, Milwaukee Riverkeeper is part of a coalition initiative called “Plastic-Free MKE,” which strives to limit plastic pollution in local waterways and eliminate plastics in the city.
“We need to figure out how to control the nuisance pollution that is trash,” Bolger Breceda said.
This story was written by Lance Schulteis. He can be reached at [email protected].
