A few weeks later, and a second visit to Centennial Pond was made. Along with some major upgrades to the cleanup process.

At the end of the last cleanup some key problems were identified. The grabber itself was too narrow at its widest, the grip wasn’t strong enough, and the rotating head caused more problems than it solved.

The magnet wand from last cleanup also had its problems. The biggest being the length of the wand just isn’t long enough to reach the ground without leaning over. On top of that, the amount of ground covered/missed by swinging my arm at a random height above the ground, resulted in more ferrous rocks being collected than fishhooks removed from the ground. The goal is to be able to reclaim fishhooks and other magnetic fishing hardware like snap-swivels and other bits of terminal-tackle.

The solution on both sides was to get the tool that was the right choice the first time. So I got an all-metal grabber that could withstand the heavier abuse, and a specialized magnetic sweeper about 40 inches wide and set on wheels with a handle that actually reaches my hand at a comfortable level. Even with a few passes I was able to cover more ground, and remove more foreign materials from the grounds.

Although overall, this cleanup took about 30 minutes less, I was able to cover more ground, resulting in about the same amount of waste removed. The biggest note was the lack of returning garbage to the areas that most of the waste was gathered from on the last cleanup.

So I looked into it, and apparently adopting your local park is actually pretty easy. So easy in fact, that I went ahead and did just that.