Green Up Keene Day

04/21/2009 19:24 Filed in: volunteering | Mina
Mina
On Saturday, GKT participated in Green Up Keene Day, an event that called for the citizens of Keene to “Green Up” the city, or in other words, make our city cleaner. Although only six of us (including me and Alisha‘s father) showed up, I would say that we got a lot of work done, and we definitely made a difference.

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The participating GKT members ended up picking up garbage from around 8:00 to 11:00 near Beaver Brook. First, we went to Carpenter St. and the field there. That wasn’t too bad, just a lot of broken beer bottles (as well as some whole ones with mysterious fluid inside) and small articles of trash. But WOW! The sheer number of cigarette butts disturbed me. They were everywhere! So many people smoke, and though it’s a disgusting habit, it’s tolerable if they care for the butts properly. Put the cigarette out on the ground, and then stick it back in the package until you get home! I also think it would be great if we had more trash-can-ash-tray-things.

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After we thought we were done with Carpenter field, we went to a different area behind the Beaver Brook Apartments. When we got there the scene was appalling, there was all kinds of trash strewn about. We found tires, car batteries, Christmas lights, unidentifiable plastics, empty soda cans, beer bottles, candy wrappers, heavily rusted metal pipes and bars, nauseating scented washcloths, of course more cigarette butts, and a simply revolting amount of other debris. Why would people litter the area with waste that could easily be taken care of by walking an extra 50 feet to a garbage can? How could they not care about the safety of the organisms depending on the land, or even their own children? If that car battery had been old enough, the chemicals could have contaminated the waters. Rubber tires don’t decompose naturally and they could be made into playground equipment for your kids if they’re recycled. I truly believe that our community needs an immediate wake-up-call and everyone needs to be more aware of the effects of their actions.

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All in all, it was kind of fun. We got a couple of laughs and it felt really great to know that we did something good for our local environment. A tremendous thank you goes to Dan, Alisha’s father, for not only providing us with the transportation but also helping us pick up rubbish. Without him, it would have been extremely difficult to have done a lot of the work we were able to do (especially lifting the heavier stuff). Personally, I hope we can do something like it again with maybe three times as many contributors.



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