Estimated reading time 12 minutes (2335 words)

Interview conducted and edited By Lindsay Welbers

Eddie Olschansky is the leader of a school of Trash Fishes. He spends most days kayaking the Cuyahoga in Cleveland, Ohio – pulling trash out of the river. He treats it like a job, loading his “gar-barge” with gross, wet river trash all year long. He relies on donations, and is happy to loan a vessel, a grabber and a paddle to any willing volunteer. The Cuyahoga lets out into Lake Erie, so what happens there affects the lives of the forty million people who rely on the Great Lakes, which includes me, over by Lake Michigan.

Eddie recognizes the major flaw of his project: Even if he’s out there 5 days a week, 12 months a year (and he is) more trash washes down the river every day. He’s committed to his work, because he views it as a vital way to serve his community. He’s got the support of community organizations, and with his volunteer crew, pulls bags of trash out of the river every day they can. I was lucky to speak with him about his mission, after I reached out to him via Instagram. If you support Trash Fish’s work, check out his Instagram, donate to his Venmo, and buy less stuff you don’t need. Our conversation is below. It has been edited for both clarity and brevity.

LW: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you become the Trash Fish?

EO: Well, maybe I was born in trash. …. Actually, I broke my leg. I do a lot of fishing, bike riding and hiking and I broke my leg. I was stuck in a wheelchair and crutches for a long time, with multiple surgeries and it was kind of putting a damper on my fishing. So I bought a kayak. … I got into kayaking through fishing and simultaneously, I was realizing that the amount of garbage in (the) waters that I was trying to fish was a real problem.

So in my younger days I would try to fish in the most secluded, beautiful, pristine areas that I (could). I was born here in Cleveland. I moved out to Pittsburgh for a while and the best places to fish around there are under the busiest highways and right in downtown and it was a very urbanized fishing experience that I had. And so I got to that and I was seeing that the trash was a severe problem in a lot of the places I was trying to fish. So I started, if I couldn’t catch fish, I started bringing in my net filled with garbage and that went on for a while and I started leaving the fishing rods at home and packing up my kayak as a garbage truck. A gar-barge as I call it sometimes, and so that turned into my new full-time hobby instead of fishing.

I was doing that either before or after work almost every day, either going out fishing or going out trash picking. … I gave myself a couple of days off of work and basically pretended like I was paying myself to clean up garbage for eight hours in my kayak. After seeing what I got done just in a couple of vacation days, I thought to myself “maybe I shouldn’t go back to work again.” I saved up all my little red pennies as best I could for about a year and moved back to Ohio to keep bills low and tried to make this work. I gave myself six months. That was like “I can pay for this. I don’t have to have a job for 6 months. I’ll do this … I’ll really make difference.” And by the time I was kind of thinking about going back to work members of the community were like, “No you’re not.” Like, a on a real level. At that point. I was doing it mostly in secret. You know, I’m not a big social media person. … The community wanted to get involved. I had to figure out a way to package this as a thing that other people might be interested in. So I did some research to maybe make that work and we’ve turned into Trash Fish. We’re trying to bring accessibility to the river to as many people as possible. And while we’re at it we might as well pick up some garbage.

A fluid situation

LW: We try to get a hike in once a week or so and we started picking up a bag of trash every week. It’s just it’s amazing. It’s so disgusting.

EO: Oh it sure is, you know, but like at least you can feel a little bit better about what you’ve done and the fact that you’re going to hike next time …

LW: It’s true you go back to the second time and there’s just less trash.

EO: Yeah. Well, you’re lucky because that’s not the way it works in the river. … So, on the trails or at a beach … or even on the side of the road, if the trash was there today, it was probably there two weeks ago, and it’ll probably be there in two weeks. If no one picks it up, right? So in the Cuyahoga River, it’s a very fluid situation. Every time it rains, I get a new flood of trash that comes out of the storm drains. It comes off of city streets, out of the suburbs, washes into the sewer and then eventually makes it back to the river and then specifically in our river. If someone, mostly me to be quite honest, doesn’t clean it up, it’s only got a finite amount of time before it travels all the way down river into Lake Erie.

And actually if you look on a map, the map of the Cuyahoga is basically directly in line with what we call the Crib, which is a giant orange building out in the middle of the lake that you can see from shore. That is our Municipal Water Supply pump so (the) river basically dumps directly into our drinking water supply and Lake Erie is the water supply for 11 million U.S. and Canadian residents.

A lot of people (say) “Oh save the turtles” or “save the whales” which, like, don’t get me wrong. I love turtles and wales. I am a little bit more focused on us. On the damages that this does to my human community members. So we’re doing our best to try to keep as much plastic out of my community’s drinking water as humanly possible.

Volunteers and funding

LW: I was under the impression that you are the Trash Fish. But you keep talking about we. So we tell me about we.

EO: We is important to me. We have a very small select group of … small businesses that have helped us raise some funds. They are definitively part of the Trash Fish family. My volunteers are probably ten times as important as those donations are. We’d be nowhere if the community was not involved. Like I could go back to doing this one or two days a week, but I have people from the community that are chomping at the bit to borrow my kayaks, who want to come out and get elbow deep in the garbage with me. I can’t stop those people. They’re my inspiration for when I have to go out on my own.

Winter garbage kayaking

LW: You were out there all winter long. Are there any particular challenges involved in it?

EO: The biggest thing is safety. And safety and hygiene is at the upmost, the very top of our list at Trash Fish and that doesn’t just go for my volunteers. That’s me as well. So, I had to buy some winter specific gear like a full dry suit, ‘cuz the water gets too wet for a wetsuit. So I need to be fully sealed and that’s one of the biggest things.

It goes back to the accessibility that we try to bring with Trash Fish. Kayaks are expensive, water sports is expensive, transporting your boat is expensive. So I know a lot of people can’t do that and so I went out of my way to buy seven kayaks and … and I can bring the right gear to anyone that wants to participate. So to keep myself doing it in the winter, I had to buy myself some very specific winter gear to stay safe and, we have to deal with ice on the river during the winter. So, none of my volunteers’ kayaks leave the garage during the winter. We do all of our volunteer work during the summer and, but I have the capabilities to go out there during the winter.

Where does the trash come from?

LW: So this is a big question, so I’m expecting a big answer. I’m prepared for that. Where does all the trash come from? 

EO: Where does it come from or who do I blame?

LW: I will take both answers.

EO: My best guesses (originate from the) streets around Cleveland and the suburbs. The Cuyahoga River, the last six miles of it is shipping channel … to really really large corporations. And so the last six miles of the river is more like a driveway than a working ecosystem. Before that is the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. And that is basically from Akron up to Cleveland. I think most of our trash … comes from the community around the National Park, where are they’re not the highest quality and most modern sewer systems. So every time it rains basically, we get we get human waste, both biological and trash, flowing into the river unfiltered, unregulated, unstopped. So yeah, I would say ninety nine percent of it is coming directly from the sewers. There aren’t a lot of people who are standing next to the river hucking their pop bottles and chip bags and stuff. So one of the things that really led me to realizing that was the amount of kids’ toys that I find in the river. I get balls and Nerf darts and little plastic toys that I know were not thrown in the river. They were left in someone’s front yard. It rained, the wind picked up or whatever led to those things being tragically ripped away from a child that desperately loved them and ended up in the sewer, ended up in the river. So my best guesses is that most of it comes from the suburbs of Cleveland.

So who do I blame for that? Not the people that are forced to buy plastic bottles and single use plastics. We don’t have good options outside of that and if we (do) it’s priced out of most of my community. Being sustainable is very expensive.

Do your best not to buy anything that you don’t need. Look at your grocery list, pick the thing made out of plastic that you maybe don’t need and find an alternative or stop buying them. Because the blame really falls on these massive corporations. … These plastic manufacturers that pump this stuff out for their own profit with total disregard to how it affects the environment or the wildlife. Plus those people in communities that pay for these products.

If we had better options …I hate using people’s names, but if we decided to boycott Coca-Cola and we decided that the entire country was only going to buy Coca-Cola in glass bottles, do you think Coca-Cola would go out of business? No, they would implement a packaging solution that people were okay with in the snap of a finger. They’ve already spent millions of dollars trying to develop these things because they know the chickens are coming home to roost, their time is coming to an end. It might not happen in the next 20 years, that might not happen in my lifetime, but eventually … we’re not going to have (the) option to continue to flood our environment with plastic. So they have to give us another option. …I could literally watch someone throw a fast-food bag out of the side of their car window and I would not blame them. ’Cuz realistically even if they threw it in the garbage can or they took that cup and put it in the recycling, once it’s out of your hand, there’s no guarantee that anything good is happening to it.

What can we do?

LW: What can the average person who lives anywhere in the Great Lakes region do to keep their trash from getting in their rivers?

EO: The absolute best thing that you can do – you can donate to whoever you want whether it’s your time or your voice or your money – but the best option is to look at your grocery list and start knocking stuff off of it. If you have your favorite brand of, potato chips, pop or whatever it is, find an option that doesn’t come in plastic. If you desperately need to drink your carbonated beverage, get it in something that’s not plastic. Buy it in glass bottles, find a refillery.

One of my favorite things to do just ‘cuz it makes shopping fun, I go to the refillery and fill up my soaps, right? So I use the old plastic (bottle from) my shampoo that I had years ago. And when I stopped buying it, I still use that plastic bottle to go to a refillery and fill it up with brand new (shampoo. Buying) bulk soaps, bulk anything is going to be better for waste than buying individually packaged nonsense.

The biggest thing is if you don’t need it, don’t buy it. ‘Cuz hey that helps you in the long run, you’re saving money by being sustainable, and that’s a really really increasingly hard thing to do. So many people just say it’s too expensive to live sustainably and I’m like, well nothing’s cheaper than not buying it.