On July 31st, a group of volunteers ended Plastic-Free July with a bang by participating in the annual 5 Gyres Plastic-Free Parks campaign! We spent the day helping clean up Crater Lake National Park and logging our finds in the TrashBlitz app.
🌊 What is the 5 Gyres Institute?
5 Gyres is a non-profit organization that was founded to investigate important unanswered questions about plastic pollution and the impact it has on us and the rest of the planet.
🌳 What is the Plastic-Free Parks Trashblitz Campaign?
"Plastic-Free Parks is an annual TrashBlitz project that tracks waste trends in U.S. National Parks and on federal lands. The goal is to understand which materials, items, and brands of waste are most common to work toward solutions that protect our parks from the harm of plastic pollution." - The 5 Gyres Institute
After arriving at Crater Lake National Park's Rim Village Visitor Center, we spent time going over the TrashBlitz app and assigning volunteers to our clean-up areas.
The following locations were chosen for the cleanup due to the high foot traffic and easy accessibility:
Mazama Village
Rim Village
Steel Visitor Center
Discovery Point
Watchman Overlook trailhead parking and Watchman trail
🤔 What kinds of litter did we find?
We found mostly non-recyclable litter in the park, with the top 5 items collected being:
1. Food Wrappers
2. Cigarette Butts
3. Fragments
4. Textiles/Clothes
5. Plastic Film
Top Materials
1. Plastic
2. Mixed Materials
3. Paper
4. Aluminum
5. Fabric
All in all, we collected data on 180 pieces of trash, with 72.2% being made of plastic.
🔎 Why did we spend 3 hours picking up and recording trash?
The data collected at Crater Lake is part of a nationwide volunteer-led effort to identify and mitigate plastic pollution in our National Parks and other federal lands.
The Department of Interior had plans to phase out single use plastics in our National Parks by 2032, but as of May 20th, 2025, that order has been reversed.
Single-use plastic production and consumption is climbing, and with the recycling rate in the U.S. clinging to a paltry 5-6%, the answer is clear: We can't recycle our way out of this problem, but we can be the change we want to see.
🥾 Join 5 Gyres in their effort to help keep our parks plastic-free!
💚 Our favorite part of the trip:
One of the most welcome sights at the park was the water refill station at the Steel Visitor Center. Using purified water from Annie Spring, the park installed this station to encourage visitors to reuse, reuse, reuse!
Sign reads "Annie Spring Hydration Station - Refill Your Bottles Here with Pure, Clean Spring Water. Crater Lake has some of the cleanest water in the world-and you can help keep it that way. Disposable water bottles create litter in the park, and wind can carry them over the rim and into the lake. While recycling helps, far too many plastic bottles end up in the landfill. Instead of purchasing disposable water bottles, fill reusable bottles here with free, purified water from Annie Spring, the source of Annie Creek. Fill up, drink up, and enjoy!"
