More Top Picks Best Amazon Prime Day Macbook Deals 2026
player ready...The chilly, rainy weather did not dampen the spirits of volunteers who came out to Naperville’s Pioneer Park Saturday morning to participate in the annual DuPage River Sweep.
“The community certainly cares about the environment. This is their home,” said Dave Cleveland, a retired teacher who formed a group from Elmwood Elementary School in Naperville to help clean up the west branch of the DuPage River.
The group members were among 720 volunteers who registered to pick up debris in and around DuPage County waterways Saturday.
“Last year the sweep removed nine tons of trash at about 25 locations in DuPage County,” said Jan Roehll, program director for the Conservation Foundation, which started the effort in 1991.
Nine-year-old Nahliya Wehr said she wanted to participate so she could “use a poker. You can stab things. And we saw baby tadpoles.” Her mother, Lisa Wehr, said she signed up her family because “we’re always looking to do things outside and meet other like-minded people. It’s fresh air and spending time together. I’m pleasantly surprised there isn’t a lot of litter.”
Wehr’s three kids seemed to be having fun splashing around in puddles while finding a hub cap, golf ball and a lot of plastic to toss into the mini Dumpster donated by Waste Management.
Roehll said Naperville is “one of the cleaner areas,” and other locations require a full Dumpster for all of the trash collected. Over the years the DuPage County River Sweep has removed lawn furniture, containers of anti-freeze, bicycles, umbrellas, tires, sports equipment and other discards — nearly 261 tons of garbage in the past 26 years — from the banks of the DuPage River, Salt Creek and many tributaries.
“The plastic stuff and Styrofoam, those can break down and get into the water system,” Roehll said. The DuPage River feeds into the Illinois River and eventually the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, where a dead zone along the coast of Louisiana is so contaminated the fish can’t survive, she said.
The sweep usually includes volunteers in canoes and kayaks to grab trash from the water, but Roehll canceled those because of the rain and rising water levels. “It’s too dangerous. The river is too swift,” she said.
The sweep’s traditional removal of invasive species, which crowd out native plants and strangle regrowth in forests, was also curtailed due to the wet weather, she said.
“When the lightning and thunder came, we pulled the plug because of safety issues,” Roehll said. “It’s disappointing. We tell groups they can reschedule. We have a rain out day when volunteers can pick up supplies on their own.”
Cleveland, who runs the environmental club at Elmwood School, said he’s happy to see the amount of trash in Pioneer Park has diminished each year over the past three years.
Despite a smaller turnout because of the rain, Roehll said the event still had a big impact. “People running by today said, ‘Thanks for cleaning up,'” she said.
Roehll added the Conservation Foundation does “other things to keep the river clean, like storm drain stenciling, so people don’t dump things down storm drains. People think it goes to a sewage plant. No, it goes directly to the river.”
Diane Moca is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.