Another Successful Spring Cleanup

Monday, June 10, 2013

Twenty-two volunteers turned out on June 8th for the annual “spring cleanup” of a small section of the Sugarloaf Path near the Robin Hood Bay landfill site. The group collected more than 40 large bags of litter, everything from chip bags to Styrofoam packing material which had blown into the area over the winter.

However, this was a modest haul compared with tonnes of plastic bags removed in earlier years of the campaign to eliminate the “plastic forest.” ECTA and the City of St. John’s have partnered on this project since 2005, when hikers had to literally wade through plastic for a short distance on the newly upgraded path. After this year’s “tidy up,” there is virtually no litter in sight of passing hikers, a remarkable success story.

Shelley Pardy and other staffers from the Waste Management Division of the City of St. John’s handled logistics for a safe, sunny and enjoyable morning, while path custodian Mark Graesser provided on-site leadership for the outing on behalf of ECTA.

Article by: Mark Graesser

Photo captions and credits:
1. A volunteer reaches for plastic under trees near the Sugarloaf Path (Mark Graesser)
2. Danny Goodyear and Bess Norman haul the garbage they collected from the trail. (Mark Graesser)
3. The volunteers and the 40 bags of litter we collected in about an hour (City of St. John’s)
4. Knee deep in plastic (2008 clean-up) (Janny Van Houwelingen)
5. Volunteers and what they collected (much more than 40 bags) in one of our 2008 cleanups (Mark Graesser)