To celebrate Earth Day, students in fifth- and sixth-grade at St. Helen School were challenged to find somewhere that they could help make the environment cleaner by picking up litter...
Clean Up Adventures
To celebrate Earth Day, students in fifth- and sixth-grade at St. Helen School were challenged to find somewhere that they could help make the environment cleaner by picking up litter.
Audrey Kilmer chose to clean up at the Burton recycling center. She commented, “I couldn’t believe how much trash was there. There were little pieces of plastic everywhere. I’m glad that I cleaned it up.”
She hopes that in the future that residents will pick up trash that falls out of the recycling bins or if the bins are too full, that they would come back another time.
Natalie Gerstenberger had a similar experience at the Russell recycling center. She was surprised at how much trash was on the ground in an area where trash is meant to be disposed.
“We need to be more careful in throwing away our trash. Even if you didn’t intentionally litter, everyone needs to make sure that items get in the right place and don’t blow away,” said Natalie.
Closing the lids of the bins when finished is a good way to help with this.
Allie Wiseman found a lot of trash in her neighborhood and suggested that since a lot of people are going for frequent walks, now that they are stuck at home, that if everyone could pick up the trash that they see, it wouldn’t get swept away by rains and end up in rivers and oceans.
In her walk down Music Street, Kaitlyn Welhouse picked up 45 pieces of garbage, about half of which were plastic and seem to have been thrown out of cars. “Birds can mistake plastic bottle caps for food and feed it to their babies.”
Even though they were acting as individuals, their combined efforts removed a lot of garbage from local communities. It takes hundreds of years for plastic to naturally decompose, but it does break into smaller and smaller pieces pretty readily, which is when it can wreak havoc on the environment and even get into the human food chain. The students learned that by doing their small part, they can make a difference.
