A cinderblock, a plastic drainpipe, window frames and a cabinet drawer are not what one would expect to find during a day on the river, but all were part of the haul picked up during this year’s NC Big Sweep.

NC Estuarium’s Linda Boyer coordinated the cleanup efforts in Beaufort County.

Six volunteers gathered debris and 60 pounds of trash along about six miles of the Pamlico-Tar River last Thursday. The team covered four local sites.

“We cleaned up Castle Island in the Pamlico River, and Party Island in the Tar River, and shoreline in between,” Boyer said.

North Carolina Big Sweep started in 1987 as “Beach Sweep” by Dr. Lundie Spence of the North Carolina Sea Grant College Program.

The sweep was the country’s first statewide waterway cleanup. Because it is typically held on the first Saturday of October, statewide results were not yet available.

Boyer said she had to work around full calendar to find a time that would work, but additional clean up efforts might be added.

The purpose of the sweep was to not only rid the environment of litter, but also to promote environmental education and coordinate an annual statewide cleanup.

According to NC Big Sweep officials, litter can last hundreds of years in our environment. It attracts disease-carrying mosquitoes and rodents. It’s deadly to wildlife that eat or become entangled in litter, and once entangled, wildlife often attract other wildlife to the same hazard.

Every year, Big Sweep volunteers find entangled animals, and last year was no exception. Of the 29 entangled animals found in 2012, only five could be released alive. When litter finally starts decomposing, it leaches chemicals into our groundwater.

Litter also affects the local economy by deterring tourists and giving business owners looking to relocate a bad impression of the area. Boyer said this year’s haul was not nearly as bad as years past.

“There have been no big storms this fall so far, so there wasn’t a lot of storm debris to cleanup,” Boyer said.

Last year, 109 volunteers cleared more than 400 pounds of trash, including machinery parts, 16 tires, 40 bags of recycled material, 42 bags of trash that went straight to the dump.

Since North Carolina Big Sweep was founded, it has had almost 335,000 volunteers and collected more than 11 million pounds of trash from North Carolina waterways.