September 28, 2012

Tennessee is surrounded by natural beauty, but it can sometimes become polluted.
    
Now it's time to make a change.
    
Volunteers are willing to get dirty to make things clean.
   
On the roads surrounding Percy Priest Lake, dozens of people are in the weeds, clearing and cleaning truck loads of trash.

"You see all kinds of things here and all of it's just totally improper," says Mark Thien with the Nashville Clean Water Project.

It is National Public Lands Day, and all across the state and nation, volunteers are cleaning parks, lakes, and forests, and wetlands.

Nashville's Clean Water Project has spent years cleaning Percy Priest Lake, now they have moved out to the 18,000 acres that surround the water.
   
Mark Thien is one of the group's organizers.

"We just put into the truck an old-fashioned big screen tv," says Thien.

It's clear some people dump things here on purpose.

The Clean Water Project has 100 people working around the lake.
        
Thien says when it comes to cleaning the environment, someone just has to step up and do it.

"It's a unique person that is willing to come out and pick up another person's trash," says Thien.

With each trip into the woods comes another surprise.  Some of it has been here for years. Now it's gone in a day.
       
The ground is cleaner, and volunteers hope it will make a difference that next time someone chooses to litter.

"The big key to this fight is getting the stuff off the ground so people don't see it, and don't think that's it's ok, in some weird way, to leave their stuff," says Thien.

The Nashville Clean Water Project organizes one of these clean-up days twice a year.
     
The hope to do even more in 2013.

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