Thursday was Earth Day and students all over city took a break from their studies to get out with their gloves and garbage bags to pick up litter that accumulated over the long winter season.
For one lucky 10-year-old boy, his willingness to clean up his school yard paid off in a big way when he looked down and saw a scrap of brown paper sporting the image of former prime minister Robert Borden. He’d found a $100 bill mixed in with all that trash.
The Earth Day activities laid the groundwork for a small army of volunteers who registered for Sunday’s REAPS (Recycling Environmental Action Planning Society) Spring Clean Up. People descended on parks, parks, river banks, parking lots, roadside gutters/ditches/boulevards and residential neighbourhoods to pick up garbage and beautify the city. They found tires, wood pallets, car parts, appliances and all kinds of paper, metal and plastic waste and piled it up along roadways for city crews to pick up later.
Elm Street residents Tim Graham and Pam Hodson were out Sunday morning with their bright yellow Pitch-In Canada garbage bag picking up litter along Patricia Boulevard on the bank overlooking downtown. The retirees go for walks regularly along that stretch of roadway in their neighbourhood and just wanted to do their part to make those walks more pleasant for people.
“We hadn’t done this before so we thought let’s give it a shot and we can do it at our leisure so we don’t have to rush,” said Graham. “We’re pensioners with nothing but time.”
Hodson loves getting out to do her own yardwork and keep her garden tidy and she didn’t mind going through the bushes to pick up some of the unsightly trash others had left behind.
“We walk every day and we see all the garbage and it just seems to be lying there constantly building up,” said Hodson. “We know they have a cleanup day so we went online to see when it was and we wanted to participate in it.”
They weren’t alone – 2,135 people signed up for the spring clean-up and they adopted 312 kilometres of city roadways as the focus of Sunday’s activity. Their clean-up efforts were charted on a map for city truck drivers to follow later for pickups.
“I think this is wonderful, it gets the communities together and gets them walking around the area and seeing what’s happening,” Hodson said. “It’s beautiful in this area and we just love it.”
Hodson used to live in the Lower Mainland and says there are designated community clean-up days in which people without vehicles can leave out any kind of garbage on their curbs and trucks would come along later to pick it up free of charge. She suggested a similar type of program might work for Prince George.
It was cool start to a sunny Sunday but it warmed up to 10 C by mid-afternoon.
“It’s a perfect day for it, that’s for sure, we’re pretty blessed,” said McClymont. “The worst complaint I had all week was that somebody went rogue and pitched ion a cleaned up there area before Sunday.”
People from the Christian Reformed Church of Prince George on Masich Drive got their work done on Saturday when they went across the street at Carrie Jane Gray Park and came out with piles of wood pallets and tires people had left in the woods. The piles they collected were picked up later by city parks maintenance staff. McClymont said most schools took part in cleanup activities on Thursday, with kids and teachers concentrating on their schoolyards and high-traffic areas and fast-food restaurants. She said picking up trash is a year-round activity for the volunteers who make up the Prince George Nature Team.
REAPS has been around since 1989 but the city’s spring clean-up activities date back much longer.
“This has been going on for more than 100 years,” said REAPS executive director Terri McClymont. “In the archives of the city, Mike (Kellett) in communications found some literature from a city council meeting in 1915 about a spring clean-up.”
REAPS established five locations with steel dumpsters for people to take all the non-recyclable trash they’ve collected. The containers are located at the REAPS headquarters (1950 Gorse St.), College Heights Secondary School, Hart Mall, Third Avenue and Watrous Street, and in Vanway at the intersection of Bunce Road and Park Drive.
The bins are not for hazardous household waste, metal, electronics and yard/garden waste. Electronics can be dropped off at PG Recycling & Return-It Centre at 2614 Petersen Rd., just off Highway 16 at the bottom of Peden Hill. Other recyclables and waste can be dropped off free of charge at the landfill off Foothills Boulevard or at city transfer stations.
Everybody who registered is eligible for a draw for a $200 restaurant gift certificate and a draw for a composter and rain barrel.
David Mothus, who keeps his finger on the pulse of the city through his Hell Yeah Prince George Facebook site, decided last year to try to get city businesses involved in rewarding clean-up volunteers and they responded to his social media post by donating a handful of gift certificates last year. This time around he rounded up 57 gift certificates worth about $7,000. He and friend went off on their bikes to play Santa Claus, looking for people picking up garbage to hand out the gift cards. Some refused to accept any kind of reward.
“There are so many people out today, it’s awesome – the whole city’s getting cleaned up,” said Mothus. “You can see the difference when you go around, like yesterday was dirty everywhere and today when you go by areas, man, there’s not a piece of garbage around. It’s a great thing.”
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