TODAY WAS A GREAT DAY!!!

 

Today was such a good day!  I started out hiking at Sand Run Metro Park with the dogs.  We were climbing this brutal hill, and I saw a candy wrapper.  I walked on by.  Then I went back and picked it up.

There are no trash cans on the trails.  Isn't that strange?  Maybe people don't typically eat and hike, especially here.  It's very hard.  But I had to carry that candy wrapper and the poop bag with me for three miles.  I could imagine some people flinging both into the woods, but I didn't.  There were trash cans by the picnic tables.

Tonight, I headed out where I was hoping to find more trash than last night.  I definitely did that.

The Dollar Store on Main looked okay driving by, but it was not okay at all.  I picked up 1,289 pieces of trash around the parking lot.  It was about as bad as I've seen it.

It's clean on all four sides now.

Even their plastic crates were all over the place.  I wonder why they can't take care of their property.

I picked up all the trash around the crates and stacked them up again.  It only took a minute.

After that, the next area that looked bad was by the Napa Store on Main.  And bad is an understatement!  Wow!  I picked up 1,238 pieces of trash here, but it was really disgusting stuff.

The grass in the field was up to my knees, and I didn't want to walk around in that because of ticks.  I got as much as I could reach.  A very nice man who lives behind this field came over and thanked me for picking up all this disgusting garbage.

There's a mechanics shop beside the field, and I walked over and asked the guy working on a car if I could clean the trash inside his fence.  He looked at me like he didn't understand at first, and then said yes.

When I left, he thanked me with a big smile.

This is how disgusting it was!  Clothes, pills, needles, rotten food, tires, pieces of carpet, pizza boxes . . . so gross.  

I almost walked away from this one, but I thought I'd pick up some of it, and I actually went back to my car and got two more 42 gallon bags and cleaned it all.

Sometimes, it's hard to know where to stop once I get going.

The bags were too heavy for me to get back to my car, so I stacked the tires by the road and I'll report this to Keep Akron Beautiful.  

I didn't want to ask them to pick up any bags this weekend, because I know they won't get picked up until next week.  I hope the hopeless people don't rummage through them, but I had no choice.  I couldn't move them.  All those wet clothes and garbage was very heavy. 

After I finished there, I went up the street a little ways to the parking lot at a Firestore Store.  I picked up another 611 pieces of trash there.  Altogether, 3,138 pieces today.  That's a big day!

But wait until you see this!  I picked up all these bolts and nails in those parking lots!  Where do they all come from?  

So far, I have picked up 874 nails, bolts and screws, and swept up 1,376 piles of broken glass.  

Picking up trash is so much more than bottles, cans and styrofoam cups.  It's about keeping my neighborhood safe.