Baling Plastic out of Tennessee!

We are Eddie and Tara! We own and operate a small kayaking business in Sparta, TN! Our focus for our business has always been an incredible guided trip that not only allows our guests a magical day on the water at a beautiful waterfall but also learning the history and appreciation for the area by doing trash cleanups on every trip.

Our trash cleanup journey started with just the two of us in 2020. We picked up before and after trips to keep our launch and lake that we operate on clean. In 2021 many more outfitters came out to our area bringing on new regulations due to the enormous amount of people flooding the area. The new regulations for outfitters meant longer being able to meet at the launch site and transporting our groups from our parking lot. So we had to figure out how we could transport our guests to the launch but still have time to keep our beautiful area clean.

Born was the idea of the KAT Challenge. Our KAT Challenge was wildly successful in our 2022 season and is a trash collecting competition among our kayaking guests during our trips. Our groups collected tons and TONS of trash from our lake all season long. You can check it out here: https://kayakingadventuresoftennessee.com/kat-challenge

In our Off-Season, we decided we needed to expand our trash collection even further with our 2022-2023 KAT Trash Challenge. Anyone across the US can participate by helping to keep our hiking trails, parks and communities clean. We set out on our own personal challenge in cleaning every boat launch/marina on our lake at least once before the new season. Our lake is Center Hill Lake and is 64 miles long with over 400 miles of shoreline so this has been a big task but in just a few months we have done over 18 cleanups on our lake!

While doing our cleanups we realized one important thing…plastic bottles. So MANY plastic bottles going into the dump! We talked about starting recycling the plastic and cans after our cleanups to not only clean our area but help the environment even further. We got 4 metal bins for our house and have been collecting trash from the roads and local sporting games to fill them up and keep all that plastic out of the dumps. This is where your help comes in! We would like to bale all of this and resell it to put back into our conservation efforts. We found a small used baler that would be perfect but we need help with the cost of the baler and getting it transported to our house so we can continue with our loving mission to protect our beautiful Tennessee. We are just trying to raise $2500 dollars and it will all be used for this baler and all we will need to make it work. Every little bit helps, and we appreciate you so much! Thank you for reading this far and for wanting to help in this very important mission we have! We understand that not everyone has the time to get out and do cleanups but by helping us with our mission you are helping keep all of Tennessee beautiful through our hands.