LINCOLN – Members of the Lincoln Conservation Commission and Blackstone River Watershed Council/Friends of the Blackstone cleaned out another 56 pounds of garbage from the river on Friday.

Stephanie Santos, of the Conservation Commission, said there was only one needle found this time as part of the pre-Nor’easter cleanup from the WaterGoat Litter Boom. A propane tank was among the items caught.

The boom is aptly named for goats because of its knack for devouring everything coming downstream using suspended curtains as a barrier.

Santos, Scott Bacon, and John Marsland did Friday’s work at Sycamore Landing, removing trash that would have previously ended up clogging up the Pratt Dam further down the river. The boom was funded through Keep Blackstone Valley Beautiful and the Narragansett Bay Commission.

Santos said she sees this volunteer effort become the standard for stopping trash and preventing it from entering the ocean.

The Local Insider recently reported on Marsland’s involvement with a program to teach local children to fish.

Here’s a story on Santos published by ecoRI last year.

This Trash Collector Makes Blackstone River Cleaner

By Bonnie Phillips / ecoRI News staff

October 6, 2025

Stephanie Santos with a pile of debris collected from the Blackstone River litter boom on Sunday.

LINCOLN, R.I. — Of all the trash and debris gathered by a new litter boom on the Blackstone River, the item that has most surprised Stephanie Santos is the number of needles she’s collecting.

“We’re seeing a lot of nips, single-use plastic bottles, and syringes,” said Santos, chair of the Lincoln Conservation Commission who helped get the boom in place. “It’s tough to see.”

Santos, who has participated in a number of river cleanups over the years, became concerned about the amount of trash collected around Pratt Dam and, once she had the support of town officials in both Lincoln and Cumberland (the dam sits on the towns’ line), she started looking into ways to divert the trash from the river.

Her search led her to the WaterGoat Litter Boom, which uses flotation devices and a suspended net designed specifically for fast-moving rivers to catch trash, while letting fish slip through and kayakers or paddlers glide over the buoys. The company makes each litter boom to fit the area in which it will be installed, according to the Florida company’s website, which didn’t list prices for the booms.

“Kayaks go right over it,” Santos said. “The net is under the surface of the river. It even catches bottle caps.”

Santos and other volunteers from the Blackstone River Watershed Council/Friends of the Blackstone have been cleaning out the boom regularly since its installation in August, and she was at it again Sunday. They are logging the types and weight of the trash collected, and she said Sunday’s take was “much more impressive — 80 pounds. It took us 2 hours.”

Santos said the previous cleanup yielded 70 pounds of trash, much of it waterlogged and heavy. “It’s remarkable and impressive how much trash we’re pulling out,” she said, adding that means that much less trash is heading into Narragansett Bay. “We’re preventing it from getting it into the ocean as best as possible.”

She said the volunteers who go into the water “are careful, we use thick rubber gloves and wear wetsuits.”

Because the volunteers must be in canoes or in the water to clean out the boom, it will be removed from the water in December and put back in the spring, Santos said.

The boom was funded by a grant from Keep Blackstone Valley Beautiful, and Save The Bay helped file a permit to install the boom with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, which approved it earlier in August.

Santos said she hopes the Blackstone River trash boom will inspire other communities to install them.

“I would love to have this serve as an example,” she said. “This is one less piece of plastic that is entering the ocean.”