Step 3 action post:

1) To date, I have completed one nature clean-up along with my other group members: Dorra J and Chantal M. We went to a park in our community close o our school. At Mundy Park, we picked up a lot of garbage on the main trails as well as hidden ones where people don’t usually go. We picked up trash for about an hour and a half and had great success. Even though this might be our first clean-up, we picked up a lot of garbage of different sizes that made an impact on our environment. I look forward to more nature clean-ups with my group and to making an even greater difference!

2) Our biggest success was the amount of trash we picked up off the trails. In only an hour and a half, my group managed to pick up about 3/4 of a big trash bag. Although that may not seem like a lot, the trails were already extremely clean and well kept. We also picked up a lot of smaller pieces of garbage; however, those small pieces did not fill up our garbage bag as much as the bigger pieces did. An example of this would be a small toy, candy wrappers, and broken pieces of plastic. Therefore we ended up picking up more pieces of garbage than it seems, but the larger pieces took up more space. Our second greatest success was finding and planning a day where all of us were able to complete this action. We all have different schedules and different lives. Even though it’s only for around an hour and a half it’s hard to fit in. For example, we all have school, some have jobs and others have extracurriculars and we all have responsibilities at home. Yet, we managed to find a date and time where we would be able to come together and complete our first action activity. We hope to do many more and find more days when we are able to do more in order to help our community and our environment.

3) In our first action activity my group faced many obstacles. Our biggest was the weather. When planning for the clean-up we checked the weather a week prior and it said it would be nice. However, it was decently hard and it was quite cold. Since we were out for about an hour we noticed our bags were getting soaked. This became another issue as we had papers and laptops in our bags that we obviously didn’t want to get wet. Luckily we had 3 extra garbage bags which we put over our bags and tied to cover them. Towards the end of our clean-up, we could barely feel our hands and we were beginning to get too cold, so we started heading back. Our second greatest problem was almost getting lost in smaller trails. Since we notices there was barely any trash in the main trails, we decided to go along smaller more hidden trails to find trash because we thought that would be where people would be likely to dump more garbage. As we wandered further and further into the small trails, we began to realize that we had no idea where in the park we were. We decided to continue straight because we hoped to eventually reach the main trail, but as time progressed we started to get more and more worried as we didn’t have service, didn’t know where we were and it seemed like we were walking through the trail forever. Luckily we kept going straight and reached the main trail!

4) Next in our plan will be to do another cleanup this following week at the same park. Our plan is to switch where we clean up every two weeks in order to clean up different locations and help different parts of our community and environment. We would all love to do clean-ups every week however, with our different schedules it’s very hard to manage. So, we plan to continue these by-weekly clean-ups on different locations every two weeks to make our impact and our new experience much greater. Our biggest goal is to clean up a total of 5 different locations and we will strive to achieve it. I’m excited to continue with my group and to make a difference for our environment!