Cleaning up ALL of the trash in the public woodlands in the Illinois Valley
Upcoming Clean Sweep: July 11, 2026
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Trash Tip Line
Have you spotted some trash, or abandoned vehicles or RVs, that you’d like us to know about? Use the “trash tip line”!
Clean Sweep Background
In 2025, we started on our “Clean Sweep” project, with the goal of cleaning up ALL of the trash in the public woods in the Illinois Valley watershed. We started with our worst area, the Kerby Mainline area near the transfer station, and spent most of the summer and fall picking away at the trash there. With the hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash, scattered and clustered on the roads in a 1-mile square area, it has taken more than a thousand volunteer hours to get it cleaned up. Which is actually a phenomenal achievement, because it honestly did not look like a do-able project when we started. At this point we are about 99% done with cleaning up the trash at Kerby Mainline. A couple of spots still need some tractor work, and BLM is still working with the local tow company to remove the rest of the vehicles and RVs. We’re so close! And now we have anti-dumping signs and a couple of trail cameras out there, which may help deter re-dumping.
As the project has built momentum, we have seen more and more volunteers turn out to help pick up the trash, with as many as 80 people helping on a given Saturday morning. Each month we see lots of new faces, volunteers of all ages, including some whole families, and often tractors, excavators, and dump trailers that people bring. We clean, we carry, we haul, and then we wash up as best we can for whatever the fabulous lunch is that day. With crowds like that, we can get about 60 cubic yards removed per day.
Every Saturday brings a new “tough spot”: one spot where four tractors worked together for four hours straight and just barely finished, or one spot down a steep ravine, where 30-40 volunteers worked in the same spot for four hours and just finished, or a half-mile stretch of one road that filled a 30-yard dumpster all by itself. This project couldn’t function without such a great group of volunteers! We appreciate every single person who has come out!
After Kerby Mainline, we started on the Selma area, which also almost done by now. We’ll do some work in July in the Waldo/Takilma/O’Brien area, and then we’ll look to the center of the valley for the Holland/Caves area, and then the finishing details in the Kerby Mainline and Selma/Deer Creek areas.
We’re getting a reset on the atrocious trash all over the valley, and helping the woods return to it’s natural state!
The coming year will also see us putting energy into the prevention of future trash dumping. We have a big list of ideas for changing the culture of trashing the wild spaces. Sign up for our mailing list to receive a free copy of our outreach strategy document, with the whole collection of plans! We’re already getting started on some of the follow-up that needs to happen in our area, in order to prevent the recurrence of the trash disasters that we are cleaning up.
This is a Rural ReciProsperity project that is a collaboration of so many groups! Cave Junction Farmers Market, Illinois Valley Community Development Organization (IVCDO), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Josephine County Solid Waste Agency, and Southern Oregon Sanitation, Cave Junction City Council, and the Illinois Valley Family Coalition are our key partners, and then our local businesses have provided additional invaluable support, particularly Sugar Pine Dine – all that food so we don’t keel over while we’re working! And then of course the volunteers – more than 100 individuals and families from across the whole diverse spectrum of local residents, working together to get that trash picked up. Some of our volunteers have given 8 or more weekend days to picking up trash with us. We appreciate everyone so much!
Free Transfer Station Vouchers
If you can’t afford the transfer station fee, you can now receive a free pass to take one cubic yard of trash to the Kerby Transfer Station! We’re hoping this can help with better trash disposal (less of it in the woods!) in our valley. Please go by the IV Family Coalition to get a pass if you need one! And please don’t go get one if you don’t actually really need it, because we want to have enough for those who really do!
The IV Family Coalition is open Monday-Friday, 9-5, at 535 E. River Street.
This program is funded by a grant from the Josephine County Solid Waste Agency.
Why do we leave the junked cars and RVs behind when we clean up an area?
It is illegal for us to move anything that has, or might have, or might ever have had, a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). So we leave them! We can clean up around them – and then later, eventually, they get burned, like clockwork. Check out our catalog of existing RVs and smashy cars that we are not allowed to remove, and more about the hazards that they present. It is a dysfunctional system that does not serve us, and we either need a workaround, or a change to the system!
What's up with all this trash needing to be cleaned up?
As far as we can tell, rural and urban areas alike struggle with illegal dumping. Here in the Illinois Valley, we’ve seen successive waves of boom-and-bust industries that have left our region economically devastated – and out of the desperation is borne the irresponsibility of disposing of tons of trash by dumping it in the woods. It’s time for a better path forward – a better relationship to our “stuff”.
We’re working on several actions to compliment our cleanup efforts. We’re starting a vouchers program so that low-income folks can go to the IV Family Coalition and get a pass for a free load of trash at the transfer station. We’re working with county officials to change the county ordinances that are currently so weak on illegal dumping. We’re installing trail cameras in key areas to spot re-dumping activity. We’re putting up signs to make people aware that we’re watching the areas. And we’re in the planning process for an outreach campaign, particularly programs in our schools, to help the next generation grow up with a new consciousness – both for watching out for habits that lead to unnecessary trash, best practices for recycling, and then what the impacts are when trash is dumped out in nature.
Trash is hard to get rid of no matter what. Even if it makes it to the transfer station and is taken from our valley over to the landfill in Eagle Point, it’s not gone. Not ever. What isn’t recycled or composted will be festering in a lined, covered landfill, pretty much forever. The ultimate goal would be a zero waste economy, which would discard the “transfer station” concept in favor of a “materials recovery station”. Trash to the landfill only goes one way – and it’s a finite planet. It’s not a practice we can afford to keep in the long run.
This is Peterson Creek. Apparently the culvert washed out some time ago, leaving a ravine about 10′ deep – which people seem to have seen as a sort of free transfer station. After avoiding this terribly difficult disaster for most of our first cleanup season, we finally cleaned it up last November. When the rains came, Peterson Creek filled with water, and no longer had to run through all that trash.
Annual Free Tire Recycling Day
Bring us your tires! Free tire disposal once a year, in late May. Find more information on our Tire Day page.
