Taking it to the finish line on New Year’s Eve, river cleanup nonprofit Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful™ (KTnRB) celebrated officially achieving their ‘2024 Goal to Remove 200,000 lbs. of Trash' with 200,056 lbs. removed by 692 volunteers.

The program is sponsored by Clayton Home Building Group® and is part of the company’s three-year commitment to support the river cleanup efforts of Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful. To date, KTnRB has rallied 4,540 volunteers to remove 836,296 lbs. of trash at 208 cleanups.

“The phenomenal aspect of our partnership with Clayton is that they’re all in, from offering sponsorship support, to organizing river cleanups with their staff, to participating in our Cigarette Litter Prevention and Recycling Program,” said Kathleen Gibi, Executive Director for Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful.

“Because of Clayton’s immersive participation in serving their river community, they will be helping us to reach not one, but two milestones this year: removing one million pounds of trash from waterways and recycling one million cigarette butts.”

Since partnering with KTnRB in 2023, Clayton team members have volunteered at KTnRB cleanups in Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi in areas near Clayton home building and supply facilities. To date, 741 Clayton team members have removed 138,814 lbs. of trash from the Tennessee River watershed.

When KTnRB reaches this year’s sponsored goal to remove 200,000 lbs. of trash, Clayton’s support will help KTnRB hit the milestone of 1 million lbs. of trash removed from the Tennessee River watershed since they put their first boat in the water in 2019.

Not only have the Clayton team members added big numbers to the KTnRB cleanup statistics, they’ve set records, too. On Feb. 10, 2023, 82 Clayton team members helped removed 28,696 lbs. of trash from Douglas Lake in Dandridge, Tenn. in just a few hours. Not to be outdone, 172 Clayton team members from another facility turned out at the next cleanup on March 24, 2023, to remove 31,115 lbs. of trash from Norris Lake in New Tazewell, Tenn. This set KTnRB records of most trash removed at a single cleanup as wells as most volunteers participating in a single cleanup.

In all, Clayton team members have participated in KTnRB river cleanups on six bodies of water, including:

Norris Lake of the Clinch River (Tennessee)
Douglas Lake of the French Broad River (Tennessee)
Cherokee Lake of the Holston River (Tennessee)
Fort Loudoun Lake of the Tennessee River (Tennessee)
Pickwick Lake of the Tennessee River (Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee)
Cedar Creek Reservoir of the Bear Creek Reservoir System (Alabama)

In addition to removing trash from waterways, Gibi said that KTnRB is also focused on preventing cigarette butts from entering waterways. "Littered cigarettes in waterways have the potential to leak dangerous chemicals that can be toxic to aquatic life. In 2025, Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful expects to reach the milestone of recycling 1 million cigarette butts, preventing them from ever entering our watersheds."

To support the program, Clayton has sponsored 100 educational art-wrapped cigarette receptacles in locations along the Tennessee River watershed. Since September 2003, 63,800 cigarette butts were collected via the 100 receptacles and recycled into outdoor plastic furniture via the program. Combined with other partners submitting cigarette butts for plastic recycling, KTnRB is on track to hit the milestone in 2025 of 1,000,000 cigarette butts recycled since they started their program in 2019.

With the 2025 cleanup schedule already underway, Clayton team members joined KTnRB’s first cleanup in January on Douglas Lake in Dandridge, Tenn. where flood outfall from Hurricane Helene has left excessive amounts of manmade debris along the lake shorelines.

Though the bay they were launching from turned out to be frozen solid that morning, preventing the KTnRB boat from entering the water (a first-time experience for KTnRB), volunteers walked along the surrounding shoreline and still managed to remove 2,418 lbs. of trash in just a few hours.

There are two more cleanups already scheduled with Clayton team members:

Friday, Feb. 28, 2025 on Cherokee Lake
Friday, March 21, 2025 on Douglas Lake

Both cleanups will be cleaning up debris that landed on the shorelines of both lakes from the outfall of Hurricane Helene.

“Unfortunately, last year’s hurricanes have left us with a lot of work to do, but the commitment of partners like Clayton Home Building Group are giving us a strong leg up in our efforts,” said Gibi. “We’re so grateful for Clayton’s commitment to help us protect our precious watershed, which is not only our drinking water source, but is considered to be the most biodiverse river system in North America and generates $12 billion a year in the recreation industry alone.”

For more information about joining Keep the Tennessee River Beautiful’s river cleanup and litter prevention efforts, please visit www.KeepTNRiverBeautiful.org.