Quantico Doesn’t Make Trash, They Clean It Up

By MIKE DiCICCO
Quantico Sentry

QUANTICO, Va. — About 80 Marines scoured Marine Corps Base Quantico last week, picking up hundreds of pounds of trash in the base’s annual Spring Cleanup.

Monday through Wednesday, Marines marched the roads and running trails collecting litter. On the last two days of the week, 60 or so Marines, with help from the Natural Resources and Environmental Affairs Branch and the Raids and Reconnaissance Section, demonstrated their capacity for amphibious operations, with many of them deploying by boat for points along the Potomac River shoreline to pick up refuse deposited by high tide.

Lincoln Housing also joined in the cleanup, with four or five employees out picking up trash in the neighborhood common areas at any given time throughout the week.

Compared to last year, said Sgt. Ahmad Gaith, the Operations Division noncommissioned officer, base police sergeant and staff noncommissioned officer in charge of the cleanup operation, “From the feedback I’ve gotten, it went faster and smoother, and there was less trash, which shows the base is getting cleaner.”

Col. James Brennan, commander of Headquarters and Service Battalion, which provided about half of the cleanup volunteers, agreed. “When you maintain something, it’s not hard to keep it clean. You neglect it and it takes a lot of hard work to get it back from square one,” he said.

Nonetheless, in the first three days, the volunteers filled about 65 trash bags, and the shoreline cleanup nearly filled two 30 cubic-yard dumpsters, as well as an eight cubic-yard dumpster for recyclables. And that doesn’t include the load of tires taken to the Stafford County Landfill Friday morning.

This was the second year that the shoreline operation was part of the cleanup, and Dave Grose, environmental management systems coordinator for NREA, said the biggest improvement from last year was the extent to which volunteers were able to recycle the trash they retrieved.

Raids and Reconnaissance employees transported Marines to various positions along the shore in an open-water safety craft, and members of NREA used two flat-bottomed motorboats to bring back the trash collected by volunteers.

Unlike the waste found along the roads, most of the trash on the shore isn’t generated by Quantico, Grose said. “It comes from upstream, but it’s our responsibility to take care of it and make the place look nice.”

As part of the recycling effort, Gaith said, any untreated wood that was collected was sent to the Facilities Maintenance Branch to be chipped and, most likely, used as mulch, and the base is looking for a way to recycle whatever scrap metal is not too badly rusted.

“I just want to thank the Marines for everything they did, for their time and their effort, and their commands for letting them come out and take care of the base that takes care of them,” Brennan said at a picnic of hot dogs and hamburgers that Marine Corps Community Services staged for the volunteers Friday afternoon.

“Participation was outstanding,” Grose said. “I think we had a lot of folks volunteer this year, compared to last year.”

Gaith said coordinators were still soliciting feedback from participants to determine any ways the cleanup can be further improved next year.

“The Marines loved the cookout, though,” he said. “They love to get some time off and play after working hard all week.”