SPECIAL TO THE T&D A view of Sunnyside Canal. Volunteers who pick up trash along the Edisto River found less of it during the drought of the 1990s. But, as the rains picked up, the trash began flowing to the river again.

Just off Joe Jeffords Highway, near the Edisto Village Shopping Center, there are about 400 acres of cypress-tupelo swamp hidden behind a chain-link fence.

As Russell Wolfe walks through his family’s land, it grows darker, with tree limbs weaving a canopy overhead. To look straight ahead is to see a primeval forest, a brooding swamp that looks like it’s never seen the hand of man. To look down is to see the refuse of Orangeburg.

There are tennis balls and children’s toys, oil and antifreeze containers, potato chip bags and plastic drink bottles. To Wolfe, the garbage mars the landscape, trashing his family’s land and the streams around the city of Orangeburg . And those streams carry their trash into the Edisto River.

“This is all part of a big filtering system for the city of Orangeburg,” Wolfe said, looking at the swamp. But he wishes it didn’t have to filter quite so much trash.

The litter ends up in the swamp and the Edisto River in several ways, but begins with someone throwing out their trash. It can be picnickers along the river, or people at the river accesses, or boaters, or folks throwing trash out of their car windows.

“People are trashy. They just throw trash everywhere,” Wolfe said. And the trash they throw out of car windows, or that blows out of the back of their trucks, flows toward the river after the first heavy rain.

Wolfe rides from stream to ditch throughout the Greater Orangeburg area, stopping at bridges and outfalls where the trash seems the worse.

He’s bitter about the trash at times. He’s lived and worked elsewhere as a part of the military and as a private consultant, and “one thing I could tell in my travels was when I was back in South Carolina because of the trash.”

“There is so much litter on the highways” and on urban streets, said Bill Marshall, S.C. Department of Natural Resources conservation program manager and treasurer of the Friends of the Edisto.

“If there’s any way for water to wash it to a stream, it gets there,” he said.

And sometimes items are too large to float. They just seem to find their way to the river.

Marshall remembers one river cleanup a few years ago and “there was all kinds of stuff – a barrel, grocery carts, broken glass.” Such items can be a danger to wildlife and people who enjoy the river, he said.

And then there’s the used oil and antifreeze bottles, which can put harmful chemicals in the river.

There are ongoing efforts to clean the river. The Friends of the Edisto holds a cleanup day in the spring, before the river begins to be used heavily, and joins in the Beach Sweep/River Sweep cleanup in the fall. The next will be held Sept. 16.

In 2005, 48 volunteers picked up trash along the Edisto River and Lake Marion in Orangeburg County as part of the Beach Sweep/River Sweep. They picked up 1,310 pounds of junk.

There are rivers with worse problems.

Norm Brunswig, also a member of Friends of the Edisto, says he likes to hunt and fish on the Pee Dee River in North Carolina. As much as he likes it, Brunswig says it’s got far more trash than the Edisto.

“That’s why each piece is offensive,” on the Edisto, he said. “It’s like noticing a wart on the nose of the Mona Lisa that you’ve never seen before and wondering who put it there.”

Brunswig is also executive director of the Audubon Society in South Carolina.

To Wolfe, the problem has gotten worse. In the past, the trash might have been steel cans or glass bottles, which don’t travel as easily as the plastic foam cups and plastic soda bottles of today.

But Marshall says the litter problem doesn’t seem to be as bad on the Edisto as it has been in the past. That may be due to the regular cleanups.

Another factor may be the weather. Marshall said that during the years of drought in the late 1990s, the river seemed cleaner, perhaps because there was less water to wash the trash down.

“It probably created a situation where we didn’t have as much runoff or floating debris and, after the drought broke, more of the debris that accumulated ended up in the river,” he said. “Now, perhaps, that phenomenon has ended.”

Wolfe thinks answers to litter might be a stronger anti-litter campaign, with stronger enforcement measures taken against people who litter. He’d also like to see stormwater engineering done that could remove trash before it reaches the river and street cleaning to catch the trash before it hits the river,

Currently, water that washes off local roads – carrying debris with it – flows straight into the Edisto with no filtering. There are methods available to clean the stormwater of debris, such as mechanical systems that can skim trash off stormwater as it leaves the pipes from stormwater systems.

“It costs money, it costs time, but one of the selling points of Orangeburg County is going to be its rivers and lakes,” he said.

Brunswig is surprised more people aren’t offended by trash, but thinks people’s consciousness will change over time.

“I think the regular cleanups of the river and the publicity surrounding those events, including signs and things acknowledging the participants, are slowly causing themselves to be weaseled into the consciousness of the public,” he said.

City Editor Gene Crider can be reached at gcrider@timesanddemocrat.com and 803-533-5570.