How to Join a River Cleanup: A Starter Guide for World Cleanup Day

The simplest way to join a river cleanup is to find one already scheduled near you, show up with closed-toe shoes and work gloves, and let the organizer hand you a bag and a stretch of bank—most events are drop-in, require no experience, and run two to three hours. World Cleanup Day falls on September 20 this year, with National CleanUp Day in the United States on the third Saturday of September, so the coming weekend is the easiest time all year to find an organized cleanup within driving distance.

Find One That Already Exists Before You Start One

Nearly every populated watershed already has a group working it—a county stormwater division, a riverkeeper organization, a scouting troop, a college environmental club, or a municipal Adopt-A-Stream program. These groups typically supply the bags, gloves, grabbers, and high-visibility vests, which is the single biggest reason to join an existing event rather than improvising your own on a first outing. Municipal Adopt-A-Stream programs generally ask adopting groups to commit to a segment of stream—often a minimum of about one mile—and to at least one cleanup a year for several consecutive years, which tells you something useful: the people running these events are doing it repeatedly and have already solved the logistics you would otherwise be guessing at.

What to Actually Bring

Closed-toe shoes with real tread, long pants, and work gloves are the non-negotiables—riverbanks are uneven, often slick, and full of things with edges. Beyond that: sun protection, a filled water bottle, and a way to wash your hands before you eat anything afterward. Leave the broken glass, sharps, drums, and anything chemical to the organizers; the standard instruction at a well-run cleanup is to flag heavy or hazardous items for the crew with the equipment rather than wrestling them yourself. Nobody expects a volunteer to haul a tire out of a channel alone.

The Clipboard Matters as Much as the Bag

Most organized cleanups ask volunteers to record what they pull out, and that tally is not busywork. Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Cleanup—the largest volunteer cleanup dataset in the world—reported volunteers collecting 1,338,712 plastic bottles and 885,854 bottle caps in its 2025 cleanup, making bottles and caps the first and third most common items found in waterways and along shorelines worldwide. Numbers like those exist only because volunteers filled out data cards. The EPA has published a full volunteer stream monitoring methods manual for exactly this reason: community-collected data is how problem stretches of water get identified, prioritized, and eventually funded for real remediation. Picking up one bag of trash cleans a bank for a week; recording what was in the bag is what eventually changes what ends up there.

If You Do Want to Run Your Own

Start by contacting the landowner or managing agency for the stretch you have in mind—city parks department, county stormwater office, state wildlife agency—because access permission and trash disposal are the two things that sink an otherwise well-meant cleanup. Ask specifically where the filled bags go; a pile of bags left at a trailhead is not a cleanup. Then pick a segment short enough that a small group finishes it, register the event with a national or regional program if one covers your area so your data joins a larger set, and recruit people by telling them how long it will take and when they will be done.

Why NuRich Cares About This Weekend

NuRich commits at least 1% of sales to adopting and cleaning up rivers, starting with the Mulberry River in Winder, Georgia. That commitment is the company's own program, and it is not a substitute for the volunteer hours that make cleanup weekends work—it is meant to fund and support them. The reason a bottle company cares about bottles in rivers is not subtle: plastic beverage bottles and their caps are consistently at the top of the list of what volunteers pull out of the water, and a bottle you refill for years is a bottle that never joins that count.

Shop NuRich

Every NuRich purchase supports river adoption and cleanup, including the 32 oz NuRich Insulated Bottle ($29.99), which holds enough for a morning on the bank, and the 18 oz NuRich Original ($14.99). Browse the full lineup at livenurich.com.

This post describes NuRich's giving program and general volunteer guidance; cleanup statistics and safety practices come from the cited public sources, not from NuRich data. Event dates, supplies, and rules vary by organizer—confirm details with the group running the cleanup you attend.

Sources: United Nations, World Cleanup Day observance — 20 September (un.org/en/observances/cleanup-day) • Ocean Conservancy, International Coastal Cleanup annual data release — 2025 cleanup results (oceanconservancy.org) • U.S. EPA, Volunteer Stream Monitoring: A Methods Manual (epa.gov) • Municipal Adopt-A-Stream program guidelines (adoption length and frequency commitments) • NuRich giving program — at least 1% of sales to river adoption and cleanup, starting with the Mulberry River, Winder, GA