Pepper23
Registered: July 2014
Posts: 1
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Littering is underestimated as a cause for pollution. It’s easy to believe that one piece of trash doesn’t make a difference among the barrage of already existing litter, but it really does. One statistic shows that 75 percent of Americans admit to littering in the last five years, according to Greenecoservices.com. Even if each person only littered once a month during that five years, that’s more than 18.9 billion pieces of litter! The litter is harmful to animals and plants, since it may choke or injure them. The long term effects are also deleterious. I gathered a team of students to help clean up this problem to potentially save the flora and fauna, as well as beautify the community.
A few months before completing the project, I had founded a student-run environmental club with a friend. We both wanted the club to be action-based rather than donation-based so that we could see the effects of our work. We partnered our club, Teens4Green, with the Frisco Environmental Services to reach a wider audience with our efforts and gain professional help. The Environmental Services helped my friend and I gain volunteers to join Teens4Green by advising us in regard to the club website, flyers, and local newsletters. After we gained about twenty members, I decided it was time to do our first project: Adopt-A-Street. I filed the paperwork to adopt the street, and soon after we received the notice that the Teens4Green sign was put up on the street we had adopted. One day, my friend and I (the co-founders of Teens4Green) met up with a group of students from the club to clean our given street and the surrounding area. The street, Hutson Drive, was in the “country” part of town where we could spot yellow bales of hay in the distance. The gray sky cast a gloomy air among the place. Rain from the day before had made the ground soggy. The scene might have resembled an impressionist landscape painting if not for the myriad of trash on the ground. Beer cans and plastic bags polluted the landscape. Forgotten Dairy Queen packages and utensils lay strewn about from the Dairy Queen close by. Wearing determined countenances and matching green T-shirts, the volunteers and I began cleaning. We collected the trash with long trash pickers and put it into large garbage bags. In only an hour, most of us had to get more garbage bags for the old ones were overflowing with litter. Since most of us didn’t know each other, we sang songs and talked as we collected. I didn’t realize that picking up trash could be such a satisfying social event. We took pictures together as the street got cleaner and cleaner. We worked our way across a quarter-mile stretch of the drive, took a break, then headed back to clean the other side. On the way, we collected money, blank checks, golf balls, and other items. I made special care to rip any six-pack packages, as these have been known to choke bird. The group finished close to noon and disposed of the garbage bags with the trash. The street we had cleaned was spotless, and looked more like the impressionist painting I had imagined. I remembered that Frisco used to be a railroad town in the 80’s; train passengers at the time must have looked out the windows at this western scene. Thus, clearing the litter allowed me to realize that the history of Frisco, Texas could be appreciated by preserving the landscape.
This project shifted my paradigm about making a difference. Even though my environmental club consisted of only a few youth, we made a visible difference in the cleanliness of our community. I was able to see that one doesn’t need much skill nor knowledge, but only a spark of motivation to act on a dream. Working together even created friendships and sweet memories. I continue to head Teens4Green and meet with the Environmental Services to learn and serve the community. Teens4Green continues to beautify the street we’ve adopted so that more can appreciate the land. Cleaning up the trash with my own hands made me realize the magnitude of the littering problem. Kicking the can down the road may seem like the easy route, but in the end, there’s still litter on the street.
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