The TCU Environmental Club participated in the 21st annual Trinity River Trash Bash over the weekend. Though the club participates every year, it was the trip after the event that really stood out.

Junior environmental science major Elizabeth Leach, said aside from giving time to the yearly event, the club also adopted a special part of the river. Twice a semester, members gather to clean the area and give back to the environment.

“We’re just trying to help out the ecosystem,” she said. 

Along the river, volunteers and Environmental Club members found a variety of trash items. Although the rain washed a large portion of trash into the water, freshman Carla Contillo was shocked to see the trash that was left.

“We found a lot of plastic bottles and Styrofoam, which I wasn’t really expecting,” she said. “I was expecting more of like potato chip bags and stuff like that.”

Unlike years in the past, the Environmental Club was able to take a tour of a landfill this year,  Brooke Long, a junior and president of the Environmental Club said. The club got a chance to see first hand what happens to the waste that is thrown away and saw how it impacts the environment.

“It just gets piled up out here [The landfill] and not a lot of people know what happens with their trash,” Long, a junior geology major, said. “They just throw it away and it just disappears for them.”

For sophomore environmental science major Sophie Amar, visiting the landfill offers ideas and plans that she has for the future. Being a native of Paraguay she said her dream is to put a landfill in her country, because currently no landfills are available.

“It’s just a mountain of trash and it’s really unorganized, really bad for the environment,” she said. “Toxics go into the soil and I think it’s really cool to see how other countries organize this.”

Long said if the tour is a success among members, it could become a yearly event and eventually become implemented in the Introductory Environmental Science courses.