A great day for my team, Keep It Clean, in The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup

Today was a great day for me, my family and friends, my neighbourhood and the environment. Today was the day I participated as a site-coordinator in The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is an initiative of The Vancouver Aquarium, the World Wildlife Fund and Loblaws Inc. to get Canadians out to their local shorelines and cleanup neighbourhoods all across the country. I called my team, Keep It Clean.

The area I chose for my clean-up site is a trail where my family take my dog for walks, it’s where we ride our bikes and walk to school. There is a stream that runs through it. It is so beautiful there at all times of year. I especially love it during the fall when the leaves are changing colour. When I’m walk along the trail I always see who lives there. Birds, squirrels, fish, chipmunks, rabbits and all kinds of insects make this space their home. It’s important that we keep our neighbourhoods clean and ecosystems healthy.

Our clean-up was hugely successful. In less than 2 hours we collected 8 huge bags of garbage. Some things that we collected included: plastic bags in the stream, coffee cups, a lot of styrofoam, small pieces of garbage like food and snack wrappers, cigarette butts, broken toys, plastic bottles and some long pieces of string. We even picked up a huge tarp and a rug from the stream!

My friend Cayla, who is 4 years old, said “we’re making the earth happy by doing this!” My friend Kiera said “it feels good helping the environment”. It made me so happy to see that my friends were getting involved and seeing that it feels good to be eco-friendly.

I want to encourage everyone to cleanup your own neighbourhood. When you’re walking down the street and see litter – put it in the garbage. What I’m also trying to teach people don’t ignore the garbage that’s on the ground and don’t be that person who’s littering. It doesn’t need to be a special day to clean up your neighbourhood, park or schoolyard. You don’t have to do it for an organization, just do it – help the environment that you live in. If we all took care of our own neighbourhoods, imagine the difference we could make.

Small things add up to make a big difference.

I want to send out a special Thank You to my friends and neighbours who came out to join us today. I also want to thank my friend Dave for the Jogi reusable water bottles Donated by Entertainment One which can be found at Loblaws. We gave everyone who came out to participate one. I want to especially thank my dad for sending out all the letters to our local grocery store, starbucks and he delivered them to all the mailboxes of our neighbours. I want to thank him for always caring for me and helping me.