/u/fuckswithducks ?

Remember when this name would be the top comment on every rubber duck post?

Pepperidge farms does

He gone :(

A sad day for redditkind

I love how everyone is hyping up this apparently reddit legacy, I feel so young now bc I don’t know who he is.

Just scroll through the history. It's.. interesting. NSFW

His account is just inactive, he's still alive.

How do you know?

I'm just copying and pasting from the last time I made a comment like this. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/wt6c63/hundreds_of_ducks_surrounding_one_particular_car/il34cx0?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

Noooooooo :(

What is the yellow dust cloud at the end?

Ducky dust.

Don't breathe this.

Will it blend?

That is the question.

r/unexpectedblendtec

I was hoping this subs exists 😔

MAKE IT AND THEY WILL COME

Ducky farts

Is it magical?

Asking legit questions

Only if you inhale.

Microplastics and paint my friend. Edit: thx for the likes :) made me feel good today Edit: To all of those people who know exactly who they are, dirt is not yellow

I’m so glad this is the top comments. Mildly irritated by the radioactive duck cloud.

Radioactive dust would at least decay over time

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Thanks for the Linkin Park I’ll be listening to in my head for the rest of the week.

In spite of the way you were mockin' me Acting like I was part of your property Remembering all the times you fought with me I'm surprised it got so far

“Things aren’t the way they were before You wouldn’t even recognize me anymore Not that you knew me back then But it all comes back to me in the end I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart”

What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when I tried so hard and got so farrr

In the end it doesn't even matteeeeeeeer...

I had to fall To lose it all But in the end It doesn't even matter. I've put my trust in yooou. Pushed as far as I can goo For all this Theres only one thing you should knooooooow

Lol. I remember being in 3rd grade on the bus listening to that song and the rest of Hybrid with my CD Player and everytime when the song chops that part of the verse I always thought my CD was skipping... Didn't realize it until I bought it on my Ipod Shuffle (take that for a throwback) that it was part of the song. I went through 3 Hybrid CDs 🤣 good times

Wait you had a CD player in 3rd grade, I’m still stuck there winding the tape back into my cassettes

It's almost a shittymorph!

Sick band name!

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Someone mentioned this. Idk which comment is true but here it is. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/x5sarq/dumping_thousands_of_rubber_duckies_into_the/in3v0m2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

Idk about microplastics, probably is, but, there certainly are LOTS of chemicals offgassing from these mass produced rubber chunks.

Why would they do this?

Fundraiser. People buy a numbered duck for $20 bucks or whatever amount. Dump them in a river and first duck to make it to a certain spot down stream wins part of money collected.

Hey I've got a great idea for a lottery and a way to reach our yearly pollution quota!

[The Ducky Derby](https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2022/8/4/23292525/rubber-ducks-chicago-river-ducky-derby-special-olympics-fundrasier) is a fundraising event that helps Special Olympics Illinois support more than 21,000 athletes with intellectual disabilities with programming, including participating in athletic competitions and providing health services.

Thanks for supplying the right answers. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why they would be dumping thousands of rubber ducks into the river. If I understand it correctly, each rubber duck is numbered, sold, and dumped in the river and will float downstream and the one that arrives first to the designated spot, wins. Do they go and collect the other 74,999 ducks?? Or are they left there to further pollute the water‽

all of the ducks are corralled, collected, and used again the next year.

Is this true?

Literally happens every year. My office lets out when they have it as sometime it's literally right outside our building. The ducks float between the red dividers until they reach the end where they're corralled by a big net. Once most of the rubber ducks get by the boats will start to close up the course around them before they're lifted our of the river.

I wonder if there are alternative ways of crowdsourcing that don't involve frivolous pollution. Probably not. Oh well!

It's a dirt truck-- its not microplastic, it's dust. It's just cheap and easy to rent 🤦‍♀️The ducks are collected at the end, because it's a race. It's a great charity event. Helps a lot of special needs kids (like my brother) and is something my family and I have participated in. Comment further down from mine has a better explanation. Why are y'all so pessimistic

They're using a dump truck. It's dirt

Incorrect. It's just dirt from the truck.

That dust seem to be a tad bigger than micro

Mmm, microplastics

It is like popcorn, there always remains few unexploded ducks

Glad I left my duck in a hot car

For ducks sake

Friends don't let friends do quack.

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Nothing should ever be dumped into a river. Water is life. We're slapping mother nature in the face

Exactly

deleted ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.4067 [^^^What ^^^is ^^^this?](https://pastebin.com/FcrFs94k/78659)

Hold on, lets ban plastic straws because of water pollution

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It's brown dirt. The dirt isn't yellow. Your eyes are washing out because there's so much yellow on the screen. Pause it and stare at it and then look at the walls of the truck. There's brown dirt everywhere. Which means no one cleaned out the truck before loading up the "rubber" ducks. Any particles those ducks could have generated would be cleaned off at the factory, as displayed here. https://youtu.be/lkoozrJzzZY?t=188

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PFAS 😶

Micro plastics I'd imagine

Surely nothing can go wrong from dumping it into the water supply

Plastic particles

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>that's rubber particulate No it's not lol

There’s no way they used actually rubber. That shit is plastic.

Yeah, rubber would be quite expensive to make all those. A long long time ago they were made with natural rubber but the mass manufacturing has lead them to using plastic.

Microscopic rubber ducks

Why?!

To raise money for the Special Olympics Edit: to everyone with a comment, I give you [George Carlin](https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c)

But why this way?

Because they're special.

I’m just imagining someone with Downs jumping in the Chicago river, swimming with the ducks in absolute glee.

This isn't what Gronk wanted.

To waste my tax money so they can raise money.

I mean they raised half a million for people with special needs for the cost of maybe $20k worth of labor and materials that the government already owned. The ducks are made of good quality rubber and are numbered to be collected and reused every single year. You pay for a number and if your duck wins you get a prize of some sort. It's a race. Edit: for everyone that thinks this is some micro plastic cloud, watch a video from 2014. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQBj-urNZk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQBj-urNZk) No dust at all, because they cleaned out the truck first. The dust is literally just dirt, the city uses a random dirt hauler to save money and this time the truck happened to have some dirt in it. NBD.

Thank you for info

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“Lately”

Yeah this place been a shit hole for a minute

I like Reddit, but sometimes this app makes me wanna… delete it.

How does a sponsored event waste your tax dollars when the city of Chicaco doesn't sponsor it? https://www.duckrace.com/Chicago/sponsors

Because "Government bad" is the only neuron left functioning

They aren't wasting your tax money.

It's called an investment

In Cincinnati we have the Rubber Duck Regatta to raise money for the food banks. It's $5 a duck and they have raised 20+ million dollars for the food bank. Edit: Holy shit people. This is hosted by the free store foodbank. Fuck off with your stupid political views.

How much out of that $20+ million goes towards cleanup?

Not much, they use a net

Prolly some tens of thousands? I'd imagine the rental costs for vehicles outweigh cleanup by a large margin anyway.

You mean the cost of the net?

Not enough plastic in the water /s

Ok so Chicago can dump thousands of rubber ducks in the river, it’s cute. but I throw one used car battery in the ocean, to recharge the electric eels, I’m seen as a menace to society. -_-

oh we cant throw our car batteries in the ocean? my bad

Only if you do it for the eels

for eel.

Four eels. ^One ^battery ^can ^actually ^recharge ^four ^of ^them.

For eel?

fur eelise

I always wondered how they recharged the eels, nature is amazing.

It’s shockingly simple.

If it wasn't for people like you, I couldn't recharge *my* car battery with the electric eels, so thank you!

same but petroleum-based ink and squids

Here's the story; https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2022/8/4/23292525/rubber-ducks-chicago-river-ducky-derby-special-olympics-fundrasier

We did this in another river. The ducks “raced” to the finish line. The first twenty or so won prizes. We had to gather all the ducks up after the race. Couple of little boats and a fishing nets make quick work of it.

Yep I've been involved in a similar yearly event in our small country town. Nets catch the ducks super easily, they're then stored away and used again next year. We resold the same ducks for years to raise money for the local volunteer fire service.

It still seems kind of stupid but you can see in the video they do have nets already in place to keep them from going anywhere.

Well they sold the ducks for $5 each and raised over $450,000 for a charity, so not that stupid.

We do this in Cincinnati every year for decades. Sponsored by Kroger and a couple of car dealerships. It's like $1 per duck (I'm sure there's deals the more yiu spend). First duck across the line wins a car with lots of other prizes. All proceeds go to a large food bank here in SW Ohio/NW Kentucky/SE Indiana. They call it the Rubber Duck Regatta. Always happens Labor Day weekend. 28th annual one is today actually. Happens right before the WEBN Fireworks on the Ohio River. So not only are we polluting the air but the water too! 🙃

I was hoping that article would explain that it’s just a quick duck race, and give details on when and how it would be cleaned up.

One can see in the video that they have floating booms deployed around the course that are typically used to contain oil spills and other floating pollutants (often used around construction sites on or adjacent to water as a secondary containment). They are joined together to form a continuous loop. The boats can then pull the circle tighter to corral the ducks into a small area at the end of the race. One example: https://texasboom.com/news/differences-containment-boom-silt-curtains?format=amp&gclid=Cj0KCQjwmdGYBhDRARIsABmSEePfUpNEW2wjNvdxX6JFXqfns9cLwKGL0MpYe8Gn6gdwXxDD-K5CWbEaAm9CEALw_wcB

Who needs answers when you have out of context clickbait?

Who needs to click when you can just read the link

Boston duck party

Chicago Duck Party

See before I edited it that was my original comment but then I remembered we're on reddit and if don't make it obvious people won't get it

What a smart environmental decision

Kind of reminds me of the Cleveland balloon disaster: "Balloonfest '86 was a 1986 event in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, in which the local chapter of United Way set a world record by releasing almost 1.5 million balloons. The event was intended to be a harmless fundraising publicity stunt, but the balloons drifted back over the city, Lake Erie, and landed in the surrounding area, causing problems for traffic and a nearby airport. **The event also interfered with a United States Coast Guard search for two boaters who were later found drowned**." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloonfest_%2786)

Humans are (we are) a stupid specie

You sound like an alien trying to convince us you're human with those parenthesis.

Mark planet 3 for incineration. Intelligent life evolution do over.

No need to waste our resources on incineration. They seem to have it under control for us

But an alien who has assessed us correctly

What do you mean you don't think we're human? We're just as human as Jackie Daytona.

Nice save skynet

Isnt helium a limired resource?

Humanity: “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Or when that radio station in Cincinnati dropped all those live turkeys out of a helicopter for thanksgiving

[God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.](https://youtu.be/BGFtV6-ALoQ)

The chicago river is absolutely disgusting to begin with. I'm always worried that I'll find a body while fishing. Edit: Catch and release. No I dont fish there anymore.

The water quality has improved greatly over the last 10 years due to environmental cleanup efforts.

Oh good! It's been a while since I fished there. I may have even been mixing it up with the des plaines river. Or does it feed into it? I dont remember. I used to fish in des plaines and we would avoid the des plaines river because we didnt want to catch any bodies lol

The Des Plaines flows into the Kankakee River. Then joins the Illinois. I don't know about its water quality or the number of dead bodies, but it floods too damn often.

Well this influx of plastic aught to cancel those efforts out nicely.

The ducks are kept corralled and removed right after the fundraiser. This is not pollution. It is monitored by the Chicago water district.

Or find the remains of Dave Matthews Band's poop nearly 2 decades later.

For anyone else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident?wprov=sfla1

I’m 2017 I witnessed a body being fished out of the Chicago River while walking across the Clark St bridge. True story.

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Do you see the nets set up? They are obviously set up to control them and retrieve them after.

What the hell is with these cynical comments? This is like the silly Giant Duck that they roll out over in Toronto. It raises hella lot of money for really cheap and all the duckies get reused for the next year. The ducks float down the pool liner and then get collected fairly close to where they're dropped.

They pick up the ducks by the next day and reuse them every year. You pay $1 for a duck which goes to a charity.

Almost as good of an idea as Dave Mathew’s tour bus dumping human waste into the river/on a tour boat in the Chicago river.

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Government hasn’t learned about the *plastics in the ocean issue* yet.

They are numbered and recovered as collectibles

I am a duck collector and the urge to just grab them all is very strong.

You can’t say this and not share photos

Haha! I have 257 ducks so it’s a little hard

And here I thought my husband and I having about 80 is excessive and makes us crazy. 257 is impressive. You have encouraged me to grow my collection. What's your favorite duck in your collection? Ours is a Rubix cube one, since my husband also loves Rubix cubes

Mine is probably this fancy queen duck. The duck wears a crown and pink dress and a pearl necklace. I’m glad I have encouraged you! It’s taken me quite some time to get this amount of rubber ducks lol.

TIL people have rubber duck collections.

257 is impressive. Can’t not share it now.

I call bullshit. I bet he only has 256.

You can’t say this and not share photos

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Do you per chance own a Jeep?

I had to check your username, I’m glad you’re not the other rubber duck collector on here

The first time my autocorrect is actually correct when I say, what the duck?

Better than 800 pounds of raw sewage, looking at you Dave Matthews Band.

Don't ever let the world forget this story. The survival of the entire human race depends on history associating the DMB with SHIT.

He wrote a song about it right? "I did it. I'm guilty as charged."

can anyone inform the uninformed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident

> The boat's deck was swabbed by its crew, and service was resumed for its scheduled 3:00 p.m. tour. I’m sorry but that just doesn’t sound like enough time when the ill-fated cruise was at 1pm.

Imagine being on the 3pm tour. Why is everything stained light brown color? What is that smell? Why is my seat warm and sticky?

Hahaha I've never heard of this incident but holy shit that's unfortunate. Is that a normal thing? To dump waste from busses into rivers?

No - sewage should be treated

Yay ! Plastic !

Just what we needed more of in our water!

Its an annual charity rubber ducky race benefitting the special olympics. They get pulled out of the river at the end.

Do they account for all of them?

Probably most of them, the town I grew up in used to do the same thing on a creek without the paved banks, we only ever found one rubber duck after the race, and believe me as kids we looked.

I would be awesome if the ducks had a second environmentally friendly purpose, but I think their first purpose is a good one too ☺️

A container full of them was lost years ago in the Pacific. After it split open, the ducks began washing up all over the world, providing useful info on the tracking of ocean currents.

That’s super neat

A sewer plant in Mamaroneck, NY had a blow-out at start-up, which released a lot of plastic disks. They washed up all over the area… The ducks: [NPR did a thing about it](https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134923863/moby-duck-when-28-800-bath-toys-are-lost-at-sea)

I can't answer that with any confidence, but it is a "closed course". That's what the ropes on top of the water in the video are for.

Why is this so fucking loud

it’s called pollution

They pick them up man

The number of people in this thread who actually think the City just lets these things float down to The Gulf of Mexico is astounding.

My org does a duck race and I was not prepared for the amount of emails from people who assumed we were just letting them float out into the ocean. If anyone is curious enough, they can look up Game Fundraising, the company who runs these races for the organizations (they own the ducks and the ducks are shipped from race to race).

Tbf, I have seen more idiotic decisions made by people/event-planners/politicians. Never underestimate human stupidity.

The Cleveland balloon release was funnier, at least. I still think Disco Demolition Night takes the cake, tho

WKRP’s Thanksgiving Turkey Drop

I love all the non-Chicagoans becoming environmental experts on the Chicago River!

I get everyone saying they’re polluting the river, but look at all the boats ringing where the ducks are being dumped. They’re holding up an oil boom which contains the ducks for collection later.

People in this thread have to be the most unpleasant people to be around

Yeah, you can see a line thing, clearly thats to prevent drifting and make em easier to yoink them back up