“Litter has a tendency to get into those little nooks and crannies. This is a great way to get at it.”
Leslie Vanclief, city surface operations
Every day, I walk in city streets. I drive to work. I run. I take the dogs out.
Most of us never think about it, but as Ottawa residents, we’re regular users of sidewalks, the path systems, schools, parks and trails. And like other things we use on a daily basis, such as our homes and our cars, the city could benefit from a little maintenance or TLC from us now and again.
Armed with garbage bags and latex gloves, I scoured — OK, maybe it was more like skimmed — the streets and parks around my home in the city’s south end yesterday.
What I found wasn’t pretty.
I picked up pop cans, chocolate bar wrappers, receipts and plastic bags. I was only out for an hour, but filled a huge black trash bag.
“That’s nice of you,” a neighbour said after I explained to her that I was not, in fact, doing community service as part of a jail release. “More people should do that. But I guess people don’t have time.”
As it turns out, Ottawans are making time.
More than 15,000 volunteers are expected to pitch in during the third annual Fall Cleaning the Capital, which started Monday and wraps up a month from now. The official launch for the campaign is tomorrow at city hall.
If all goes according to plan, volunteers will collect approximately 26,000 kilograms of garbage in the next month.
The number of participants goes up every year, said Leslie Vanclief, program manager for the city’s surface operations branch.
In 2007, more than 60,000 people came out for the city’s two cleanup campaigns, held in the spring and the fall.
The individual projects, which target trash in neighbourhoods, public parks, stormwater ponds, woodlots and schools, allow people to give back to an area of the community where they spend their time, Vanclief said.
“Litter has a tendency to get into those little nooks and crannies. This is a great way to get at it,” she said.
“Sometimes, we get whole schools participating,” she said. The event also attracts service clubs, businesses and groups of neighbours who want to clean up their streets, she said.
“They take a lot of pride in the community that they live and work in,” said Vanclief. “They want to make a difference.”
While people tend to find “food wrappers, coffee cups and chip bags, occasionally, we do find other interesting items, like sofas,” said Vanclief.
In addition to the food-related miscellany I picked up, I also found two mismatched socks, a pink hair scrunchie, a waterlogged Harlequin Romance novel, three pens, a broken pencil, a ripped dog leash, and a condom wrapper, which I confess grossed me out and I left lying there.
I didn’t find any needles, which, Vanclief said, is unfortunately “a reality at many sites.”
While volunteers take the garbage home with them or call 3-1-1 to arrange a pickup from city property, people are also encouraged to separate the trash from the recyclables.
Vanclief said she’s pleased with the number of volunteers that come out and show community pride, adding that cleanup now before the snow falls will make the spring cleanup that much easier.
Hmm. I wonder if that same theory would work for my apartment - but that’s a whole other story.
