I CLEANED A NEW AREA TONIGHT. WHAT A MESS!

 

Remember I said I wanted to clean a different area tonight?  I said it would be fun?  Remember?  Whew!  What a mess I found!

It's hard to say what I pick up the most.  Could be cigarette butts.  Could be water bottles.  Could be plastic straws.  I find hundreds of plastic straws every night.  

Did you know it takes over 200 years for one plastic straw to biodegrade?  Straws are very bad for the environment and wildlife.  And they NEVER go away.  They have to be picked up.  That's why I find so many.

Tonight, I started at the Dollar Store on Main, went past the restaurant, and I found so much trash!  Did I say restaurant?  I'm sure I said restaurant.  

(Trash and restaurant shouldn't be in the same sentence.)

Look at these steps going into the restaurant's parking lot.  How can nobody see this?

Well, I didn't see it.  I clean areas on Waterloo every week, and I had no idea it was like this.

It's not like this now. 

This is the restaurant's parking lot.  At the north side, there are big pine trees.

And in the pine trees, there's a whole lot of trash!  

This is just from that one spot.  And I didn't get it all.  It's scary going in there by myself.  I'll keep working at it.  I got everything that was easy to grab.

This is the west side of the parking lot.  

It's hard for me to believe that Firestone Park, South Akron and East Akron looked like this two and a half years ago.   (Maybe not this bad.  This is bad.)

Now it's all cleaned up, and I'll add it to my Waterloo area.  

I just wonder if there are other areas I missed.  Oh goodness, I hope not.  It's so hard to pick up that much trash.  I emptied my trash bag five times in the restaurant's dumpster.  

I filled up my recycle bin with smashed aluminum cans.  If there's a plus, that would be it.  I found lots of cans to recycle.

I picked up 3,125 pieces of trash tonight.  

The areas I cleaned look really good, but remember, it's not just about how it looks.  Trash attracts mice and mice attract snakes.  

Trash is bad.