United By Blue Wants You on the Water: Volunteer Alert

3,771 is not the number of murals in Philly or the amount of visitors that Reading Terminal gets a day. It’s the number of plastic bottles that apparel brand United By Blue pulled from the Schuylkill River during our 2012 summer cleanups at Bartram’s Garden. If those same bottles were stacked end to end, they’d tower over the Comcast Center, or Philadelphia’s tallest skyscraper.

So who is United By Blue? A group of caped crusaders ridding our rivers of litter in the dead of night? Not quite. United By Blue is an organic apparel brand that removes a pound of trash from oceans and waterways for every product sold. There’s also other volunteer efforts like helping out Hurricane Sandy victims in New York. Translated? If you buy the softest, organic shirt you’ll ever feel, we roll up our sleeves. You buy an organic, waxed canvas bag for your next adventure; we’re out on the water.

Starting this March, UBB cleanups will stretch from beaches in Florida to rivers in Maine and we want you to join us. We supply volunteers with bamboo gloves, bags, bug spray, sunscreen, water, and a free meal throughout the day.

You’ll see things you won’t find at our volunteer opportunities-like the winners of our weird trash collection- a 1998 Brooklyn College diploma, a voodoo doll, an empty gun case, and a shaved hair cutting mannequin head.

After attending a UBB cleanup, you’ll never have to wonder what hundreds of bottles from the Schuylkill River or thousands of pounds of trash look like. As volunteers bring in biodegradable bags of plastic bottles, plastic bags, food wrappers, and mountains of styrofoam: United By Blue staff weighs the trash, and volunteers leave knowing exactly what kind of impact they’ve made on their community. Some lucky volunteers will even walk away with exclusive UBB gear for winning our cleanup competitions.

On the first Tuesday of the month, United By Blue wants you to resist the boob tube’s siren call and join UBB and your fellow community members to make our waterways cleaner, one pound at a time. Check out the UBB website about upcoming cleanups or email cleanup@unitedbyblue.com.