Plastic spoons, a champagne bottle, an unopened gallon of distilled water and an egg were mixed with the traditional beer cans and food wrappers left behind by student tailgaters after the Iowa vs. Iowa State game on Saturday.

The debris covered nearly every inch of the grass lots across Elwood Drive on Sunday afternoon when members of the Cyclone Bible Fellowship, a ministry of Campus Baptist Church, arrived to clean up.

Most of the nearly 30 volunteers surveyed the scene before they dug in, pulling plastic gloves on to protect their bare hands from the filth that lay waiting. They combed the grass, bending over to pick up each piece of trash by hand, filling up one garbage bag after another. The bags were left scattered across the field for the trailer to stack them up and haul them away.

When student tailgating moves, the trash tends to follow. No one knows this better than members of the Cyclone Bible Fellowship, who are contracted to clean up seven different lots near the stadium, including the grass lots now occupied by students. Their workload has doubled this season, after university administrators moved student tailgaters from the lots by the stadium to the grass areas across Elwood Drive.

“This is probably twice as bad as the UNI game,” Lee Abuhl, leader for the Cyclone Bible Fellowship, said Sunday. “The only difference today is that we don’t have to walk as far to fill up a bag.”

The group waits to clean the lots until Sunday afternoons, because the areas aren’t lit at night and are often still occupied long after the games end.

“There are so many partiers that stay [after the game] that we can’t get to the trash,” Abuhl said.

The group uses the money they raise from the pick-up to buy hot dogs, which they hand out on game days to tailgaters who have had too much to drink or who are just plain hungry. They chose to distribute free pancakes Saturday morning because of the game’s early starting time.

Mandy Bornhoft, junior in journalism and mass communication and political science, said picking up the trash also provides money to fund the activities the group does throughout the year.

Bornhoft said she has found dirty diapers and used condoms while helping out with past cleanups.

“It’s not a fun thing to do, but I just do it,” she said. “Especially in this lot, many of these people are too drunk to even realize they’ve left so much stuff.”

Closer to the stadium, things have gotten a little easier for members of the Salt Company, a ministry of Cornerstone Church. The group, which draws up to 250 volunteers some nights, is contracted to pick up trash inside the stadium and in the parking lots directly surrounding it.

“I don’t think [students] have let up on dropping trash, they’re just dropping it in a different place. The bulk of the partying crowd is now across the street,” said Paul Sabino, director of the Salt Company. “The crowd that tailgates on the east side now brings less trash, and it’s helping us a bit.”

The Salt Company does its clean-up immediately following football games because the stadium and surrounding lots are lit.

Sabino has seen countless loads of trash since he began helping with the clean-up as an ISU freshman in 1992.

“I do see the aftermath after every game, and have for a whole ton of years, and there is a marked difference,” he said. “There is less trash [in the stadium parking lots]; there’s no way of getting around that.”

Sabino said the students who volunteer for both the Cyclone Bible Fellowship and the Salt Company take the varying amounts of trash in stride.

“It’s so enjoyable for me to direct a ministry full of men and women who serve God with their hearts and who don’t complain,” he said.

Bornhoft said volunteering for the clean-up isn’t as bad as the piles of garbage make it look.

“It’s fun to be out here together,” she said. “It’s all about service.”