A television. Four large rugs. A 30-pound rusty metal pipe. These are just some of the more than 1,200 pounds of debris two Union County high schoolers and their growing team of volunteers have hauled out of streams and rivers running through Summit and its neighboring towns.
Jase Villaverde and Dhruv Patel founded the group last year to tackle pollution in Union County waterways. What began as a small idea has grown into a team of more than 50 members who've completed three community cleanups so far, all focused on the Rahway River watershed — an 83-square-mile area spanning 24 municipalities, including Summit, Westfield, Cranford, Millburn and Springfield.
Their first cleanup, at Joe Collins Park in Union, drew 17 volunteers who collected 383.4 pounds of trash in a single day from a stream that feeds into the Rahway River.
"It makes us a little sad that such pollution is contaminating our waters, but it also makes us happy that we were able to make such a difference," Villaverde said.
The group originally went by StormNet, built around the idea of placing nets over storm drains to catch trash before it reached waterways. As Villaverde and Patel shifted toward hands-on community cleanups, they renamed the effort Project Agos — "agos" meaning "flow" in Tagalog, a nod to the rivers and streams they're working to protect.
Project Agos is already building an unmanned surface vehicle for future water-quality data collection, and more cleanups are planned along other stretches of the watershed, though no dates have been set yet.
Want to help out?
- Follow @projectagosnj on Instagram
- Sign up to volunteer through the link in their bio
- No cleanup date is set yet, but signing up guarantees you'll hear about the next one first
