Garbology revisited: Tracking trash in the Santa Cruz River

Half a mile east of Tumacácori mission, midway between Green Valley and the border, the Santa Cruz River should flow straight under the shade of a small mesquite bosque. Instead it stops.

For at least the next thousand yards the river is blocked by a dam of trash, 15-acres across. Plastic bottles, tubs of detergent and deflated balls, all bleached pale straw blond, interweave with twigs into an impermeable barrier.

With every rain, the dam is bolstered by a new wave of trash. "It's a sort of an engineered watershed," said Luke Cole, the Sonoran Institute's director for Resilient Communities and Watersheds. "Everywhere in Tucson — all of that trash will eventually make its way into the Santa Cruz River."

Continue reading about the challenge of trash in the Santa Cruz on Tucson Sentinel.